OKR Champions: 7 Reasons Why Your Company Needs Them

How would it feel if you have a superuser that understands the ins and outs of your company’s OKRs and can help all your company members easily adapt to goal setting within the company? It sounds like a win-win deal, right? This is where the term OKR champion was coined in the world of objectives and goal settings. OKR champion, as the name suggests, helps the entire company in getting the successful OKR implementation within the company. 

There can be more than one OKR champion within the company- depending on the size of the business. OKR champions can be from various departments to share the OKR tactics a little more with their department to better contextualize OKRs for their areas of responsibility. 

OKRs champions understand your company well, so much so, they understand the OKRs as well. A person who understands the whys and hows of any new framework that is being introduced to your company is a big positive. It will not only help in smooth implementation across the departments but also take away the hesitation of employees.

All this doesn’t stop here; there are a plethora of reasons that your company needs to have an OKR champion now. 

➊ Saves you money

Having an OKR champion onboard who will know all about OKRs, the ins and outs will work in many ways- will save you a lot of money to begin with. Organizations may spend fortunes getting OKRs for employees who are not even interested in adopting OKR or have little to zero knowledge about OKRs. In this case, having OKR champions with you helps you drive the successful rollout of OKRs across the organization. The budget will work in a more effective manner as OKR champions will influence other employees and collaborate with them in making the OKR implementation more impactful.

➋ Saves you time

From a business perspective, time is money, and anything that’s wasting too much of your time is considered a big NO! OKR implementation takes time, maybe more than a quarter, but managers can save a lot of time on this by having an OKR champion onboard. Investing in training a couple of OKR champions eliminates the time and money you’ll spend on OKRs training and demos for bigger teams. Employees need to undergo sets of training to adopt OKRs. Instead, if you spend your time training only one OKR champion, you’ll save time and yield improved outcomes quarter by quarter. Training OKR champions can fasten the process of OKR adoption by other employees as well.

➌ You have your in-house OKRs expert

Having an OKR champion is having an in-house OKR expert. An expert who knows how to develop the internal center of excellence of OKRs and other goal-setting agile methods. An OKR expert will guide all the employees on the steps to be taken in order to achieve important milestones. They will provide legitimate solutions to all their queries.

➍ OKR champions will help you follow up with your teams

While setting the OKRs, the biggest challenge that managers come across is following up on progress. Having OKR champions will ease the follow-up process for the top-level managers. OKR champions define and convey the process for collecting, sharing, and leveraging the OKRs to the team. This is how OKR experts work to keep track of how much progress has been made on the OKRs. The most recommended cadence for OKRs follow-ups is every three months. For example, in January or the beginning of the quarter. The follow-ups depend upon the culture your company works in as well. Quarterly OKR is more realistic on the team level, and OKR experts help you in getting that done with a laser-sharp focus on high-impact objectives. 

➎ OKR champions keep the Organization Aligned

The main purpose of setting structured objectives and key results is keeping the organization aligned with the company’s objectives and keeping everyone on the same page. Having an OKR champion will help organizations develop a culture of a shared purpose so that companies can leverage the prominent benefits of their effective goal-setting strategies. Companies want alignment because it’s an objective element of any organization that keeps things going on the right track. Alignment ensures that everyone is rowing the boat in the same approach to stop it from standing still. OKR champions play a major role in keeping the organization aligned.

➏ OKR champions contribute to the training of new members

Another reason for having the OKR Champion in your company is the training and upskilling of other team members. OKR champions contribute a lot of training when new members come on board. OKRs are designed to keep the workforce aligned, from C-suite to trainees, as per what the company has prioritized as high-impact objectives. When you have the OKR champion in your company, they will provide direction to these priorities and will ensure that all employees share a common orientation when setting the objectives on both individual and departmental levels.

➐ OKR champions help infuse the Joy in performing. 

OKR implementation can be overwhelming at the time, especially for employees who are least engaged with the organization; ‘s work environment. This is the reason, regardless of the size of an organization, some employees will always feel a sense of disconnection, lack of direction, and clarity. This happens when they are unaware of what’s expected; they don’t find any purpose for their work. This results in losing the Joy in performing. OKR Champions help in initial alignment by making everyone move in the same direction. Champions see this in a very effective manner and make sure that teams know where their key results fit in cohesively with team functions.

OKR champions will contribute a lot in creating a robust OKR implementation plan, and as a goal-setting framework, having OKR Champions will make you save on money, time, and training of employees. However, training OKR champions can be a daunting task as well for C-suite managers; this is why JOP believes in getting training from the best OKR coaches across the globe. 

Want to have your own OKR expert on board? Get in touch with us today.