Revisiting Goals Is Essential For Success. Find Out Why

How often do you and your team review goals? The statistics are not that positive. More than half of the employees do not know what the company expects them to do.

It’s not uncommon to know how difficult it is to grow a startup. You cannot keep burning money for long in a startup. It would not survive.

You need a way to align the team to work like one. Have vision and goals. More importantly, bring your team together to execute the objectives they have decided.

Revisiting goals and objectives is a major part of their implementation. How else will you know that the objectives are right and you are going in the right direction?

Setting the right goals

Revisiting will only make sense when you are managing your organization’s goals or OKRs (Objectives and key results) in the right way.

If you are not using any goals framework right now, you have to start with it. The motive of using OKRs for everyone is to get your team on the same page. 

The following points briefly describe how a successful OKR management looks:

• You have identified your organization-level goals through open discussions with all the team leaders.
• Everyone owns OKRs (even all the leaders). All the team members have special discussions with their team leaders to decide their OKRs.
• Individual goals are time-bound (preferably quarterly)
• The team gets together regularly (ideally weekly) to conduct check-ins and discuss the progress on the OKRs.
• The team members are accountable for their OKRs and are involved in the required collaboration and constant communication to achieve them.
• You review employee performances at the end of each OKR cycle. New and revised OKRs are set with discussions.

When to revisit 

If you constantly manage OKRs at your company, you will quickly know about specific issues with teamwork and goals management.

Possible reasons:

• Regular check-ins and at the end of the cycle (ideally a quarter).
• Employees still need to understand what OKRs are. For example, Confusion between usual business operations and OKRs.
• Some OKRs are not aligned with company goals, or they are not clearly written.
• The goals may be too ambitious or more than required.
• New employees are joining.

This is where goal revisiting happens. Employees involve in two-way feedback and identify issues with their OKRs, strategies, and actions.

Four big reasons why you must revisit the company and individual-level goals

1. Creating or maintaining an outcome-driven work culture

What differentiates successful teams from average organizations?

They achieve ambitious business goals. It may look like a simple and unhelpful statement, but it’s not; it’s powerful, and goals are powerful when you focus. Creating a driven work culture is no small feat. You can’t just build it with OKRs. You need to enable your team to achieve the desired outcomes.

Now Google doesn’t just write its missions and goals. They make everyone a part of it by assigning them individual OKRs.

This is not a process that takes some days or weeks. Assigning the right set of goals to everyone takes experimentation and a lot of revisiting.

2. Reviewing performance and continuous improvement

Does every employee in your organization know exactly their role?

The number may be pretty low. 63% of the workers surveyed said they want more opportunities to find purpose. (Mckinsey)

Individual goals can define employee roles and responsibilities. And it’s easier to understand their relationship to the business also.

The goals framework tells companies and employees a more straightforward way to justify work performance. This framework is an effective and fair way to recognize employee performance.

The team cannot review performance without revisiting goals. It’s quite practical to measure employee performance for a given period.

And this makes continuous feedback and improvement necessary. 

3. Check if the team is working for the right outcomes

You must revisit goals. This is the only way to identify and replace the wrong ones with the right outcomes. 

The review process needs to be a discussion between the whole team. They are accountable for their OKRs, and the revisiting gives them a stronger connection to the main business goals.

4. Re-aligning team with organizational objectives and priorities

How will you know if your KRs (key results) are making a difference in business?

You will know it at the end of each OKRs cycle (a quarter usually). With the right OKR software, you’ll learn how good employees have performed and how much of the main business goals are achieved.

For example, one main organizational goal is ideally attached to three to five objectives, and each objective with three KRs.

Apart from this metric, you may also pick the wrong targets.

Reviewing OKRs is the only way to identify bad decisions, choose the right objectives, and realign the employee and company goals.

Another major positive factor in this goals framework is timely reviews. When the team regularly goes through their OKRs, they stay motivated and move in the right direction.

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