Objectives and Key Results ensure hybrid work alignment

In 2022 companies moving to hybrid work rely on new ways to quantify and qualify progress being made. In a remote setting, it is more important to be efficient and successful in work prioritization.

Transparency and trust play a big role in understanding what is happening in a hybrid organization, but close observation and micro-management effectively kill motivation. People also want to influence their personal priorities, and to feel proficient in their own roles.

There have been several wildly successful examples of Objectives and Key Results, often shortened to OKRs, in capitalizing the best of both worlds. IBM and Google are the most noteworthy companies, who cite their success at least in part to the OKR methodology.

Improved transparency for virtual teamwork

We’re currently in a world, where most organizations use Microsoft Teams for daily business communication. Internet’s global coverage means, that the organizations might also be virtual or global. As such, they’re limited to very little time together to coordinate and collaborate. To curb the challenge, efficient online and asynchronous ways to communicate, align, and follow progress are needed. OKRs are set personally by every employee, who follow up on them regularly, and align their personal tasks to them.

OKRs offer a way to align personal and team priorities, discuss them asynchronously, and visualize issues. They are transparent across the organization, so their strategic alignment can be ensured and re-aligned. One-to-one feedback sessions are held in set intervals to ensure OKRs are being considered in work prioritization. They are not factored into bonuses or performance reviews, because that would influence personal objective setting negatively (and discourage ambitious target setting).

A typical feature of OKRs is the moonshot mentality. The target is set rather to a point that seems unrealistic, so reaching it would be nothing short of a miracle. This ensures we don’t get complacent. Typically, OKRs are set with the expectation, that we achieve around 70% of the goal.

With Fingertip, you can quantify and qualify knowledge work more than ever before, making OKRs that one bit better. We can measure the number of decisions individuals and teams make, and at what quality. We also see how many of those decisions are implemented. Similarly, we can look at the performance of meetings and projects, even objectives themselves.

Setting up your OKRs

Then how do you begin? All you need is an Objective, which tells where you want to be, and Key Results, that confirm that you’ve arrived. For example, an Objective could be: ”Be the world’s highest quality safety harness manufacturer”, and Key Results for that would be ”Customer satisfaction rate 100%”, ”Quality control pass rate in production 99.9%+”, and “0 accidents related to our safety harness use in 2022”. All the employees then need to figure out how they can personally help in achieving the goal.

The main issue with most OKR tools is, that they are separated from work, and you build up plenty of switching costs if you want to keep the data up to date. Fingertip integrates to Microsoft Teams, which is already the launchpad for most knowledge work, reducing the switching times. The tasks related to the Objectives are also transparently visible without switching to yet another platform. It also offers significant advantages in decision making, meeting management, and project portfolio planning, helping you measure more, faster. It is the modern hybrid leadership system for any knowledge organization, who wants to build better working culture using transparency, accountability, collaboration, and documentation.

You can use it to set team objectives and let people formulate their personal 2-3 objectives, and 3-5 key results per objective. Connecting all of these together, you can extrapolate the company-wide total key results, that drive your success. Fingertip highlights objectives currently being followed, and if they haven’t been updated for a while. Everything transparently within Microsoft Teams. Lead your wildly important goals and get things done, together.