In a high-efficiency team, you need professionals with an extensive array of skills in their chosen profession who can operate in an autonomous way. Having autonomous teams is every leader’s dream. But how do you achieve this result? Well, this is why OKR’s – Objectives and Key Results as an approach is so beneficial. 

You achieve autonomous high performing teams when teams are outcome orientated. The idea is to agree on objectives and key results with each team quarterly, ensure that these OKRS are aligned across teams and make progress towards a transparent goal. 

Where did OKRs come from? 

Andrew Grove is considered the “Father of OKRs” as he was the one who introduced the strategy to Intel during his tenure there and actually documented this in his book ‘High Output Management’.

In 1975, John Doerr, who at the time was a salesperson working for Intel attended a course within Intel which was taught by Andy Grove. During this course, he was introduced to the theory of OKRs, formerly known as “iMBOs” for “Intel Management by Objectives”.

Then in 1999, Doerr was working for Kleiner Perkins, a venture capital firm. He introduced the idea of OKRs to a start-up Kleiner Perkins had invested in named Google. The idea caught on and OKRs rapidly became fundamental to Google’s culture. It became a management methodology that helped them to ensure that their company was focusing their efforts on the same critical outcomes throughout its organization.

 “OKRs have helped lead us to 10× growth, many times over. 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” – Larry Page. 

What defines an OKR? 

An OKR is defined as objectives and key results which are used as a goal-setting framework for defining and tracking objectives and their outcomes. OKRs constitute an objective which are statements that describe an outcome of intent and key results which are the few measurable goals we set for ourselves. 

Why do organizations use OKRs?

Traditionally, at the beginning of the year organisations set high-level organizational goals. Generally, they are forgotten within a month which leads to passive management. This creates difficulty for leaders to measure and track their employees’ progress and goal-achievement. 

Leaders have an arduous time comprehending which teams or individuals are performing, overperforming, or underperforming. It becomes trying to align various teams and individuals causing employees to feel disconnected from the bottom up. There is little transparency amongst employees about how their actions connect to the goals of the organization. Thus, also making it troublesome to build a measurable, predictable, and repeatable business model when operating in this manner. 

In order to try to prevent this issue, organisations attempt to set goals in Microsoft office or G suite and then communicate these goals via email. This is a very latent process, and many organisations can’t maintain or track goal progress with this strategy. With static approaches like these, goals aren’t readily available or apparent to everyone in real-time. To combat this, many organisations have embraced the OKR goal-setting methodology, OKR tracking techniques, and keep their goals aligned utilizing tools like ours.

What are the benefits of utilizing OKRs?

• Autonomous teams that run without enormous input from leaders.
• Motivated teams aspiring towards the achievement of aspirational goals. 
• Clear direction and focus for every team and individual.
• Increased productivity through a focus on what matters.
• Faster response times and therefore agility through quarterly rhythm’s.
• Transparency across teams leading to lesser duplication of efforts.

Our approach to OKRs

We enable your organisation to design and scale OKR’s with speed through a simple yet powerful matrix logic and we offer a technology to make the governance of OKR’s effortless whilst keeping everything synchronized across teams. 

With Scientrix you can:

• Align OKRs in and across teams – Make the right connections to drive the organization forward in unison. 
• Map OKRs effortlessly – Instantly create, share or assign yearly or quarterly goals using our unique matrix grid.
• Govern with ease – Track progress towards a goal and set new quarterly goals.
• Make OKRs data-led – Create and link metrics, build analytics and integrate easily with other data sources. 
• Make the link to actions – Define actions and tasks and stage work in kanbans. 
• Visibility – Create visibility of OKRs across teams.

Let us help you transform your organisation by implementing OKRs seamlessly. Set up a session with us so we can tell you more about our process.