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Demystifying OKRs: OKR Readiness & Deploying it successfully in your organization – Part 4 of 5

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OKR Readiness & Deployment
OKR Readiness & Deployment

Please note, Demystifying OKRs has been divided over 5 parts, & you are currently on one of the elemental parts (Part 2 of 5). Across these 5 elements, we demystify Objectives – Key results, from theory (Part 1), it’s application (Part 2), the best practices (Part 3), OKR readiness & deployment (Part 4) & the best practices & common mistakes (Part 5). Also see, The Brew’s success stories in aligning human capital to business strategy here.

Bringing Objectives – Key Results to your company isn’t just a matter of copying the way a company like Google uses them. Google isn’t the average company, and they’ve spent almost 2 decades growing, scaling, and experimenting with how their internal goal-setting structure works. Because of that, how they use it will be incredibly different than how you will.

Also, there just isn’t ‘one-size’ fits all OKR strategy to success – that’s because at its core, Objectives – Key Results isn’t a methodology. There’s no set path or steps you take for bringing it into your workplace. Instead, it’s a set of practices and ideals (OKR readiness factors here after) that you should understand and customize for your teams.

If you want to deploy OKRs successfully it at your workplace, then we suggest to start with nimble experiments, along with keeping eye on following OKR Readiness nuances, which will make or break the transformation:

OKR Readiness #1: Train the team on the “Why” and the “What”

Too many unsuccessful implementations start the same way. An executive sends an email saying “We are going to adopt Objective – Key Results (or the google way of setting goals), please watch this video from Google.”OKR is straightforward, easy to understand but hard to master. Your team is going to need more than that to get started.

Either using an external consultant or not, your organization needs to educate the team on the following:

1) Teach employees about what motivated the adoption of OKR, explaining its benefits. Understanding the “Why” behind these transformational initiatives increases the team motivation and engagement.

2) Selecting Key Results is hard, so educating the team on how to choose them and set measurable goals is key. Too many individuals lack the proper training to set goals and to coach the team to develop theirs.

OKR Readiness #2: Start small and iterate

According to OKR coach Felipe Castro, it’s important to understand the trade-offs you’re making when you adopt & deploy objectives – key results. Which means it’s probably a good idea to start small and iterate as you understand how it works in your company.

In Google’s own guide to introducing OKRs, they suggest starting with the basics:

1) What are Objectives – Key Results? Explain the basics to your team and how they work.

2) Why use Objectives – Key Results? Review your current approach to goal-setting and any limits or issues you’ve had with that approach. This is a good time to highlight how OKRs connect everyone’s work to the company’s purpose and mission.

3) How does it work? Explain the timeline of your OKR cycle (it’s good to start with shorter ones. Around 30–45 days.) What is expected of each person. What the major milestones will be. And what success looks like. Remember, you’re not shooting for 100% every single time. And it might take some time to get your team to accept that 60–70% is totally fine.

OKR Readiness #3: Deployment strategy

Though there are several ways to implement OKR methodology, and it’s definitely not a rocket science, but the best chances to improve OKR readiness & getting adopted by the team successfully, is when the team understands the fundamental elements of objectives, key results & is able to put green ticks to most of the key results they have defined. That moment of truth get’s the team to be baptized (& sold on) by the transformational nature of OKR. From our experiences, we have seen organizations take 2 approaches to deploy the practice – Deploy in a Pilot team or Deploy it with Heads / Key Persons.

Deploying in a Pilot team helps detect pitfalls the team can face before scaling it across organization. This approach definitely helps understand atleast 2 things – how will the receptivity & acceptance be with respect to Culture & what suits best – Committed objectives or Aspirational objectives. While it deinitely takes time to figure this out, the trade-off is well compensated with developing the change agents, who can advocate & foster, scaling the framework across organization.

Deploying it with Heads / Key Persons, is again similar to above approach, where one can set aligned objectives to organizational objectives, along with understanding the possible pitfalls & execution nuances to expect & perfect.

OKR Readiness #4: Focus on communication and prioritization

One of the most important aspects of OKRs is that they’re public. Which isn’t always an easy thing for teams to do. However, making it clear where you can see what other people are working on and what metrics they’re chasing is an important part of adopting OKRs.

As former Googler and former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo explains: “As you grow a company, the single hardest thing to scale is communication. It’s remarkably difficult. OKRs are a great way to make sure everyone understands how you’re going to measure success and strategy.”

OKR Readiness #5: Use regular check-ins to stay disciplined

Because of the agile nature of OKRs, it’s important to set and stick to regular check-ins. And that doesn’t just mean at the start and end of an OKR cycle. You might want to set a cadence that includes:

1) OKR planning sessions: Bring together a small group of people that work together to plan and talk through objectives and key results for the next cycle.

2) Weekly check-ins: A team-level meeting focused on tactical updates to ensure everyone is working on the right priorities and isn’t being blocked.

3) Mid-quarter/cycle review: A quick step back to reassess the OKR, add or eliminate Key Results or adjust targets, and define action plans for addressing OKRs that are below your goal.

4) All-hands meetings: A company wide meeting where you can communicate and reiterate your strategy and goals to make sure everyone’s still aligned and excited.

OKR Readiness #6: Don’t go all in on OKRs until your whole organization/function is ready

Change is hard. And it’s probably not a good idea to just drop OKRs on your entire team. Instead, choose to either integrate them horizontally or vertically:

  • Horizontal: Start with one team and add additional ones each cycle or quarter.
  • Vertical: Start with company OKRs and senior management and then add new layers beneath each cycle or quarter.

Stay with The Brew on Demystifying OKRs for the rest of the parts. Divided over 5 parts, we demystify OKRs, from theory, its application, to OKR readiness & deployment, the best practices & the common mistakes.

Case Study – Improving Organizational Effectiveness for high growth at Social Enterprise

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Why measure Organizational Effectiveness ??
  • Organizational effectiveness is essential to an organization’s ability to implement its strategy and create impact
  • Building on Mckinsey’s & Bain’s research, The Brew has found that effective organizations demonstrate strengths in five essential areas: 1) Leadership & Clarity of Mission 2) Structure & Decision-Making 3) Capability & Capacity 4) Systems & Work Processes and 5) Culture.
  • Identifying an organization’s strengths and weaknesses in these areas through an organizational effectiveness diagnostic enables managers to maximize impact by developing action plans to strengthen weaknesses and maximize strengths
  • Measuring OE is extremely important and critical for organizations, especially those who are envisaging steep growth trajectory, witnessing challenging times from competition, experiencing sub-optimal results from strategy execution or who are on the cusp of critical change management / transformation
  • An organizational effectiveness diagnostic is a survey-based tool used to rigorously and systematically assess an organization’s relative strengths and weaknesses in each area central to organizational effectiveness.

About the Client Organization

This Social Enterprise is working across strata, to dramatically scale up access to education in the last mile. With millions of children, especially girls deprived of education in the developing world, this social enterprise is working across the country, taking a leading role with governments and partners in ensuring last mile delivery, lowering the costs of delivery, driving retention across till secondary education and accelerating the roll out of its mission, to improve access, availability, dissemination & retention across educational value chain.

The Pain Points

The senior leadership team sought The Brew’s support during a time of rapid growth in its geographic and programmatic scope. Such a steep growth path typically presents challenges, notably to ensure that management structures, systems, and processes keep pace. This, social enterprise sought to strengthen these; a particular challenge was to do so in a way that allowed the organization to retain its agile and entrepreneurial culture, and to ensure that the right systems were there to enable & sustain success.

The Brew Approach

Similar to other OE improvisation case for an ecommerce firm, this was a classic case of many things done right at a micro level, however, with a progressive & steeper context as mandate, not only the micro elements needed a re-alignment, but also the need for a strong overall glue that can channelize the organizational effort spend in to one, i.e. up the Organizational Effectiveness quotient, improving yield manifolds. (Also see, the secret of successful strategy execution – HBR 2008)

With an improvised OE, alignment & measurability deployment, in the for-profits setups the metric of effectiveness is profit differentials, serving to be a basic yardstick to help gauge contribution & utility fulfillment of all elements, however in non profit, this becomes difficult, and hence our approach was to arrive at indicative metric of overall purpose fulfillment (establishing effort correlation at functional level directly to number of girls educated & number of lives positively impacted), proportionate to each element’s contribution. In a way, this turned out to be a game changer !!

The Brew took a three-phased approach. First, a diagnostic phase including a organization wide staff survey to understand perceptions of management, leadership, culture, and systems; in-country visits including focus groups and interviews with staff to understand their priorities for improvement; and a desk review of relevant data on existing systems and processes.

The Impact – Upping the Organizational Effectiveness Quotient

After prioritizing areas for strengthening, The Brew then supported in a ‘design’ phase, using workshops with client’s project team to develop concrete work streams and initiatives, for processes and systems as well as for people and leadership development. The third, final phase involved joint implementation planning and culminated in an all-staff retreat to launch the implementation process owned and led by client. The organization was able to scale to the required levels, while re-visiting its operational metrics, effectiveness & realizing higher fulfillment of its mission.

The Outcome

A steep growth path presents challenges, to ensure that management structures and systems keep pace and agility. It’s important to prepare well, & to understand what it will take to succeed, along with knowing the cost of failure. OE helps attain these, to take us beyond the finish line.

Organizational Trust (& not Engagement): An essential to High-Performance Workplaces

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According to Gallup, 70% of U.S employees feel they are not engaged at work. To be exact, only a sheer 33% of employees are actively engaged, 49% not engaged, and 18% actively disengaged. These stats pick more on organizational diversity & culture, organizational trust & engagement rather than vindicating the organizational effort spend in building Good to Great / Great place to workspaces. (Also see,

Additional Content:

Building on extensive experiences – we touch upon the first principles of why are #employeeexperiences broken ? It’s all about building organizational trust & driving it to #meaningfulwork
What keeps Employees ticking as per Gallup ? (Click to expand)

Gallup’s meta-analysis of decades’ worth of data: It shows that high engagement—defined largely as having a strong connection with one’s work and colleagues, feeling like a real contributor, and enjoying ample chances to learn—consistently leads to positive outcomes for both individuals and organizations. The rewards include higher productivity, better-quality products, and increased profitability.

The above study emerges from arguably the most comprehensive research carried out by Gallup. Focusing on how great managers inspire high performance in employees, how do they generate passion, unite disparate personalities to focus on a common purpose, and propel teams to achieve ever-higher goals?, Gallup embarked on decades long journey of research including more than 10 million employee and manager interviews spanning 114 countries.

The results, encompass 12 elements that have most impact on the bottom line. Condensing the findings in to a book namely, 12: Elements of Great Managing (published in December 2006), it enables a prescriptive approach to managers to improve employee engagement

Counter-intuitive as it may seem, on one hand organizations are focused driving higher employee engagement (this is on top 3 priorities of every HR & Business Leaders) and yet organizations find their workforces with the above dismal numbers. Definitely, there is something more to look out for, it’s time to address the dinosaur in the room.

While Organizations are focused on developing organizational culture & busy improving employee engagement, very few are actually working towards building a culture of trust (yes, it’s organizational trust), which is what makes a meaningful difference. Employees in high-trust organizations are more productive, have more energy at work, collaborate better with their colleagues, and stay with their employers longer than employees working at low-trust companies (& high employee engagement). They also suffer less chronic stress and are happier with their lives, and these factors fuel stronger performance. Also see, The Science of building high performance organization for sustained high performance & outcomes.

Thus, it would be fair to conclude the following from the above reasoning:

  1. High Organizational Engagement does not necessarily mean High Organizational Trust
  2. High Organizational Engagement does not lead to High Organizational Trust
  3. High Organizational Trust definitely leads to building of High Performance organization, but High Engagement might not.

The anatomy of Organizational Trust

Dr. Paul Zak, in his insightful research on The Neuroscience of Trust (2017), quantifies the characteristics of trust at workplace: Compared with people at low-trust companies, people at high-trust companies report: 74% less stress, 106% more energy at work, 50% higher productivity, 13% fewer sick days, 76% more engagement, 29% more satisfaction with their lives, 40% less burnout. This is equally corroborated by another of most comprehensive evidence based studies undertaken by Google – Project Aristotle’s goal was to answer the question, ‘What makes a team effective at Google ?’. Psychological Safety, Dependability, Structure & Clarity, Meaning, and Impact were the driving factors to determine team’s effectiveness. Not surprisingly, the first 3 elements are closely related to culture of building trust.

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High-trust organizations enjoy 25% higher productivity

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High-trust organizations have 27% higher retention

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Employees of high-trust organizations take 2 fewer sick days (33% reduction)

Drawing upon validated research, which is validated by Zak’s team at a neuroscience level, there are exactly (& only) 9 key behaviors that result in trust & trust-building (also see, OKR’s – which equally resonate well with a similar set of behaviors), These 9 key elements directly influencing the trust drivers are: Recognizing Excellence Socially, Induce Challenge Stress, Autonomy, Self Management, Openness, Caring, Mastery, Authentic & Psychological Safety. A deliberate & conscious practice of these enables building the foundation of trust & symbiotically, a trust-building culture,

To conclude, building a culture of trust is key to building a high-performance organization, realistically maximizing the probability of achieving strategic goals and successful realization of organizational goals. It is the cornerstone of maximization of goal attainment & a leading driver of organizational success & progress.

Case Study – Improving Performance Management Effectiveness in Mid-Size Media Organization

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Performance management is like budgeting: It’s required in every organization, it’s cumbersome and onerous, it never comes out exactly as you planned, and managers always whine, but you would never get rid of budget planning just like you should never get rid of performance appraisal – because no matter how flawed the process is, it’s good business practice.

For much long per­for­mance management practice has been overly prescriptive, rigid & more often divisive, and hence it’s no surprise that most of the organizations want to have a complete relook at it – to a more principles-led approach, and an approach that’s aligned to the modern workplace & workforce. The entire monolithic black-box practice is undergoing a much needed revamp – See HBR’s Reinventing Performance Management

The Brew’s Performance Management Practice includes:

  • A complete diagnostic review of existing mechanism & measurements
  • Effectiveness & Benchmarking KPI, which could include: Surveys, Focus Groups. 
  • Independent testing of metrics & KPI’s against strategic objectives.
  • Support for organization to cascade & deploy the Performance Management Process
  • Support in implementing the process
  • Support for augmenting process to practice – with continuous embedment to culture, business & organizational ethos

Find out more about The Brew’s Performance Management Practice; Also, see The Brew’s Performance Management Effectiveness Index to measure the effectiveness of entire practice.

About the Client Organization

A Mid-size media organization

The Pain Points

No consistent approach within the business to appraisals and target setting. No visibility of performance, achievements or areas where intervention was required to realign certain employees with business goals and company values. A bespoke appraisal system was required.

To summarize the pain points, here are the top 4 (attributing to 90% of organizational dysfunction) of the entire laundry list:

  • Focus everyone on taking accountability for delivering our new strategy
  • Embed a new set of organizational behaviors and drive our desired culture
  • Better performance conversations that are less algorithm / mechanical based and more engaging
  • Include well-being into performance conversations

The Mandate for End State Performance Management Practice

  • Clear objective-setting and mon­i­tor­ing across the organ­i­za­tion, aligned to new strategy
  • Real time and visible reporting capability at all levels – employees, managers, management & leadership
  • Frequent regular conversations and check-ins, that include well-being along with per­for­mance and per­son­al development 
  • Regular feedback, related to new behaviors

The Brew’s Approach

We were already working with the management team to resolve capability issues within the team. With this additional challenge, we met with the leadership of the company to acquire macro information about the business goals, it’s alignment across the organization and to audit performance management effectiveness of what was already in place.

With respect to solution, it required a complete overhaul l of entire performance management practice – right from identifying off the shelf solution customized to our context, to formulating the process, practice, effectiveness metrics suitable to the industry context, & adhering to needs of business model asks of the client.

Given the overhaul of entire practice, the change management for the entire organization was huge, but with our constant highlight of the pain points to the workforce, along with how the new solution would solve these, provided its adopted by all in the system, ensured a much smoother adoption by the workforce.

The Outcome

The performance management practice was developed and rolled out in line with business requirements to monitor the targets of everyone in the business.

Within a short space of time, the adoption of the the new performance management practice has been amazing, with more employees setting clear and well-aligned objectives. With aligned goals & cascades happening across the system smoothly, this has hugely helped support the goal of creating a culture of regular feedback. 

  • Adoption has been quick and positive, colleagues and leaders love the simplicity and clarity that the new approach provides
  • 93% adoption of objective-setting, all aligned to strategic deliverables
  • Average of 68% colleagues receiving feedback within the last 4 weeks
  • Of all the objectives set, around 24% are mapped tto well-being objectives, focusing on maintaining mental & physical health, giving back and improving work-life balance

Along with it, Communication was improved. Business needs were cascaded to all employees. Ideas the employees had for continuous improvement and their roles within the business were implemented, and the data generated was used to justify appropriate pay increases – that were measured on output and displaying the right behaviors and values.

Organizational Dysfunctions: Goals & Goals Alignment – Part 1 of 2

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Please note, Goals & Goals Alignment has been divided over 2 parts, & you are currently on one of the elemental parts (Part 1 of 2) For Part 1, refer here. Between these 2 elements, we attempt to elucidate on the most fundamental measure of organizational progress & success (or lack of it) – Goals.

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How the world’s top teams set and hit goals

In Dan Pink’s Ted Talk on motivation (& this equally gets addressed in Drive), he discusses the importance of autonomy when it comes to goal-based motivation. Believe it or not, most employees want and need to know four things about their work so they can contribute and feel comfortable about where they are in the organization:

  • What do I need to accomplish?
  • Why am I doing what I’m doing?
  • How well must I do it?
  • How am I doing?

Similarly, in this regard, zooming out the scale at an organizational level, goals serve four basic functions:

  • They provide guidance and direction
  • Motivate and inspire employees,
  • Facilitates planning & organizing of resources
  • Helps organizations evaluate and control performance

What’s broken with the goals, these days ??

Organizational goals help employees know where the organization is going and how it plans to get there. Drawing analogies at micro & macro level, it becomes imperative for organizations to make sure that people/teams are comfortable with the individual/micro goals, set in the realm of possibilities, cumulating into macro organizational goals, in such a way that each and every one of them is focused on achieving results – moving the flywheel from personal fulfillment to organization realization of its mission.

Unless we have a purpose, there is no reason why individuals should try to cooperate together at all or why anyone should try to organize them

Lyndall F. Urwick, Harvard Business Review, 1964

It’s been more than 50 years, since this was penned, but despite all of our technological and societal advances, we still seem to be struggling with this exact issue. As the authors of The Strategy-Focused Organization found, a mere 7% of employees today fully understand their company’s business strategies and what’s expected of them in order to help achieve company goals.

Goal setting and Goal alignment are a serious problem (and hence a fault-line, as the title puts it), once the organization or team expands beyond a scale of 10 – 12 people. Making sure everyone has goals that align with the organization’s purpose and vision is no small task.Also see, The ROI on Goal Management from HR ROI series

It’s easy enough for marketing or sales teams to set goals like “Acquire X users” or “Double email list.” But for other teams? When you’re in charge of your core product/strategy and need to react quickly to changes, you can’t stick to the same old static goals.So, how do the best teams in the world with products bringing in billions in revenue keep their eyes on the end goal while staying nimble and agile? Let’s find out.

Goals are the reason, your team wants to come into work every morning (Re-Read this X 2)

First off, there’s more to goal setting than just telling your team what they need to do. When done properly, goals aren’t just a to-do list, but a direct line to your company’s vision and purpose. From the recently drawn behavioral research (Flow & Atomic Habits), individuals are able to attain a state of flow (a state characterized by 9 attributes – How to Measure Flow with scales), should the goals exceed beyond their current capabilities, by approx. 4%. Effectively, goals need to aim to trigger the state of flow. This enables seeking of 2 critical needs of man’s search for meaning through work – professional mastery & actualization through work), emphasizing the need for deeper contemplation of nature of goals vis a vis the talent strategy.

Think about this stat for a second: FitBit users take 43% more steps than non-users. Why? Well, it turns out that just having insight into their data and progress towards their personal goals is enough to get peoplle to put in extra miles every day. Imagine what would happen if every member of your entire company knew for a fact that the work they were doing was moving the whole organization forward. Actually, you don’t have to imagine.

Studies have shown that committing to a goal can help improve employee performance and help build a sense of togetherness and motivation across your team. More specifically, research has shown that setting challenging and specific goals can further enhance a team’s engagement in attaining those goals.

Bottom-line is setting proper goals for the team doesn’’t just keep your team aligned with company goals. It leads to higher performance, a sense of happiness and ownership, and ultimately, success across the board.

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