The Ultimate Guide to OKRs

Since OKR imparts transparency and alignment within an organization, embedding it within your work culture results in a productive work environment that is focused and functions collaboratively to achieve the goals.

In this section of the OKR guide, we highlight how your company can optimize the most inefficient, yet very important and frequently conducted activity within an organization - meetings.

“There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little.”

John Doerr, author of Measure What Matters

Why integrate OKR into company meetings?

It’s advisable to integrate OKRs into your regular meeting agendas than having separate meetings to discuss OKRs with your team. With this, you will have transparent, productive, and regular meetings that help you align with your objectives.

1. Adjust course as you progress

The highlight of the meetings is to discuss your OKR projects and track their progress concerning the main OKR Objectives defined. This will help you check if your Projects need any iterations in terms of their definition. Based on Projects completed, you can grade OKRs and determine the gaps in execution.

2. A constant goal reminder

By embedding OKRs as an exercise in regular team meetings, your team members will always get reminded of the Objective before and after the meeting. As an employee goes onto their busy schedule, this repetition enables them to take daily decisions while keeping Objectives and Key Results as the north star.

3. Align laggers and head-starters

Understand who is lagging and who is performing exceptionally based on their completed Projects and Key Results progression. With transparency, you can shuffle your teams, understand issues faced by laggers, and know what projects are leading towards success.

4. Achieve meetings that conclude

Often normal meetings go on without any solid conclusion that gives it a bad name. By using OKR as a basis, your meetings will always have an end result and key action points that your team members could follow upon post OKR meeting session.

Incorporating OKR meetings into your daily schedule is also a key thread that helps bind OKR into your company culture. From higher management to new joiners, OKR meetings make it crystal clear how your organization desires transparency, values time, and is result-oriented, every day. Let us understand how to bring OKRs into your company meetings.

How to design an OKR meeting agenda?

We have designed a 5 step process for you to follow for your meetings:

1. Discuss last meetings action items and overall progress

Gauge your team’s progress by reviewing previous meeting action items and grade them based on your OKR grading system. Place your Key Results in the timeline of overall OKR program progress to understand your team’s pace.

2. Separate lagging projects and Key Results

Based on your OKR Grades, separate the projects and key results based on: high risk of failure, underperformed or not achieved. Understand why your team could not perform as desired and brainstorm action points for bringing it back on track. Also, for each project, redo its role in achieving the Key Result.

3. Separate completed projects and discuss their impact on Key Results

Analyze the key reasoning in terms of the team deployed, projects issued, and processes followed to achieve the key results so that you can repeat them. It’s also important to understand if the completion of every project has indeed impacted the Key Results or not. Don’t forget to celebrate and appreciate team members who have performed well!

4. Revise Projects and iterate on Objectives and Key Results (only if required)

Gain clarity for lagging and completed projects and their role in moving closer towards the objective. Identify projects that are causing deviation or are not well defined so that you can iterate on them.

5. Design upcoming week’s action items

Design a plan of action for lagging projects and assign new targets to team members who are on track. Document any tasks that need to be presented in the next meeting for everyone.