Why are agile organizations increasingly adopting Objectives and Key Results (OKR) as their goal system?
Larry Page, co-founder of Google, has stated that; “OKRs have helped lead us to 10× growth. They’ve helped make our crazily bold mission of ‘organizing the world’s information’ perhaps even achievable. They’ve kept me and the rest of the company on time, and on track when it mattered the most.” Since then, similar tech start-ups and growth organizations have followed suit. Why? Why are agile organizations increasingly adopting Objectives and Key Results as their goal system?
Traditional planning methods are too slow for today’s fast paced business agility. If you set your company innovation goals for the coming 12 months and then visit the progress 11 months later, you’re investing in goals that collect dust before they drive your organization to renew, transform or grow.
Agile organizations respond fast to market and environment changes and are focused on customer needs. In today’s fast changing world this can be a game-changing capability. Agile enforces experimenting, continuous learning, and transparent collaboration. When agile teams are empowered to make decisions, the strategic focus and company alignment needs to be clear for everyone. This is key for the teams and individuals to perform and drive results.
The OKR framework is especially powerful for organizations looking to become more agile. The iterative nature of OKRs delivers as key benefits focus, alignment, and engagement. OKRs are used to create qualitative, measurable, and inspiring goals which align daily work with the organization strategy, and then systematically follow up progress. Eventually the goal is to also develop new, better targets, and make ourselves accountable.
Today’s employees want work to provide or serve a higher purpose. People seek meaning and impact and want clear roles and responsibilities. The new digital mindset expects transparency for decision making, engagement and collaboration. Knowledge workers of today also want to be given challenges.
OKRs have the built-in idea of ambitiousness: goals seem impossible to achieve, so called moonshots. The idea is to challenge teams and individuals out of their comfort zone, into a new way of finding solutions. Fingertip strives to integrate the objectives and key results to the daily work and empower employees to align ambitious personal achievements with the company’s success.
Today’s remote and distributed work needs a motivated organization, aligned for focus and goals, adapting to the changing situations and different scenarios. If looking at agile organizations for answers on how to manage this it looks like OKRs could be one answer.
For more about Fingertip methodology on how to use OKRs, head over to our Knowledge Base.
Free whitepaper: How to setup Objectives and Key Results in your business
Objectives and Key Results (OKR) are a tool for measuring individual and organizational progress. They help people with goal setting and motivation.
This whitepaper gives you a broad understanding of objectives management, and how Fingertip enables you to increase focus and alignment using the OKR framework.
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Objectives and Key Results
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