Gaurav SabharwalUltimate Guide to Objective and Key results – OKR Meaning and Examples
Do you dread setting goals for your organization as you don’t see useful results? […]
When was the last time you gave a thought to whether your employees feel that their job is right for them? Are you aware of what right actually means for them? Ensuring that your employees are satisfied with their job should be one of your top priorities of yours if you want to enhance the performance of your employees and the organization as a whole. The question is which is the best way to do so, right? Thanks to OKRs, even in such uneven and disrupted times you can boost the job satisfaction and performance of your employees.
It is no rocket science that when there’s a boost in the job satisfaction of your employees, their performance is bound to get enhanced as well. Being already a top priority for several years, ensuring job satisfaction has become even more prominent in the disrupted work environment organizations are working in today. When it comes to brainstorming ideas on augmenting job satisfaction and performance, there used to be a time when leaders only thought of pay and other such monetary benefits. But today, the mindset of the workforce has changed due to the influx of Gen Z and millennials. Therefore, the management of large and small businesses has been consistently probing and implementing new processes to adapt a robust goal establishing process and a powerful performance management system.
Processes such as frequent check-ins, rewards, and recognition, employee engagement surveys, 360-degree feedback when combined with the latest technology are being adopted by organizations globally to boost the job satisfaction and performance of their employees. Objectives and Key Results (OKR) is particularly assisting the organizations in soaring the job satisfaction and performance of their employees. Objectives tell the employees where they need to go, and Key result serves as the footsteps that help you to measure the progress of your employees towards the objectives.
This brings us to the question, how can you use OKRs to boost the job satisfaction and performance of your employees? But first, let us take a quick glance as to why you should prioritize boosting the job satisfaction and performance of your employees:
a. Increase in productivity
b. Skyrocketing performance
c. Engaged employees
d. Happy customers – good customer retention rate
e. Higher revenue
f. Decrease in employee turnover rate
How OKRs help in boosting the job satisfaction and performance of the employees?
Provides clarity and direction
The experts of the OKR industry suggest that it is better to try out the OKR for one team or department of your organization and then roll it out to the entire organization to make it work better. While establishing objectives and key results, you should take the inputs of your employees and also give them the autonomy in setting their own objectives and key results. In this way, accountability will be embraced by your employees and they will have a better understanding of the expectations of the management. OKR will enable you to give a clear direction to your employees about what steps they have to follow and achieve to reach the desired destination.
Increased engagement and efficiency
Alignment, clarity, fair appraisal process, and involvement in the goal-setting process are promised with OKRs. They’re everything you need to keep your employees engaged. When the employees are responsible for the KPs, they would eventually be more motivated to perform better and work towards attaining the objective. As a result, the overall efficiency and productivity of the workforce will experience a drastic increase. When your employees meet the managers regularly for discussions, they will be receiving continuous feedback. This would help them to grow in their professional life and keep their engagement high. OKRs result in increasing the employee engagement rate and reducing the attrition rate.
Performance management becomes easier
Using an OKR tool will enable you to set objectives and key results, tag feedback, and reward against the goals. This will result in motivating your employees to even perform better. The powerful dashboard of an OKR program enhances the user experience by providing deep insights on employee performance, all at one stop. These reports will come in handy for you to conduct a fair and transparent performance appraisal process. Say no to the halo effect, recency effect and central tendency bias as all the proofs will be maintained well with the help of the technology. Your leaders and teams would start to move towards a positive nurturing culture.
Perfect alignment
When you set the objectives and key results for your business, teams, and allow employees to set their OKRs in alignment with the overall business mission for the year – you establish a highly aligned organization. That is, your employees will be able to refer and consider whether their goals are contributing to achieving the organizational objective that fiscal year or quarter. This approach works to promote collaboration and transparency. You can check the alignment during the approval process and direct the individual and teams if you spot any gaps in it. Thus, you ensure that all the efforts are focused on one common shared goal.
Stretch goals turn into reality asap
There’s a reason that OKRs are known to be a special goal-setting framework – they push the entire organization to achieve even the stretched goals, which the majority of the organization gives up as they appear to be impossible for them. Google Chrome used the same goal-establishing process to make their browser the number one browser for three years and they did achieve this stretch goal. If your reams take the OKRs seriously and do not have them for the sake of it, the growth can even intensify up to 10x. They are not supposed to serve as false hopes or promises as history is flooded with organizations that achieved the pinnacle with OKRs.
Therefore, OKRs present numerous ways through which you can motivate the employees, boost their job satisfaction and performance. There are numerous shreds of evidence for this. Organizations of all sizes and industries have time and time again achieved insane results through OKRs – both for the organization and its employees. Contact us right now if you too want to reap these benefits by implementing OKRs in your organization.
