Translated from Português (Brazil) • View original OKRs are always a topic of good discussions, as there are still many doubts about creating goals in the bottom-up sense, in the transparency of 100% of goals for all employees or even in the annual vs. quarterly breakdown of vision. When we think of multinationals of 5,000 employees, the scenario described often becomes almost impossible. But the text below by Monica Santos, director of human resources at Google, breaks some of these paradigms and shows how an ocean liner like Google navigated in uncharted waters and stood out as one of the largest companies in the world to use and succeed with OKRs. Mônica Santos is Google's Human Resources director and this content teaches us a lot about goal management. Here, she talks about what it is and how to implement the OKR methodology. Let's go? We have one goal with this content: to make you understand the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) methodology. And that you can apply it in your business. We will do this through a text of up to 800 words: short and objective, with some examples to illustrate what we want to convey. Simple as that. Believe it or not, we have just defined an OKR. Incredible, isn't it? It's because they should always be like this, simple enough for you to understand them and feel excited to achieve them. Now that we have our goal established, let's get down to business. Do you know what are the steps to implement an effective OKR system?
- Understand that OKRs are part of the Company's culture
An OKR culture is established when there is a real interest of a company in establishing a structured process for achieving goals. We imagine that when reading the word "culture", some negative thoughts such as "my company is not prepared for this" or "I don't know where to start" may have come to your mind. Don't worry if this happened, Google also went through the same situation in the beginning. In fact, this methodology was implemented when Google was not yet "Google". Just a group of professionals in the first year of the company's birth, showing that it is possible, yes, that any enterprise can structure its OKRs, regardless of its size.
- Understand that OKRs help classify what is a priority
OKRs are nothing more than a set of interrelated objectives that, achieved individually or collectively, will contribute to the macro objectives of an organization. In this way, they are vital for the professional to understand their scope of work and know where to direct their efforts and where not to spend energy. We can say without fear of making a mistake that an objective management of OKRs increases productivity and greatly reduces the dreaded stress in the workplace. In addition, by producing more, the employee's self-esteem increases, reducing health-related problems and lack of motivation. In other words, everyone wins.
- Understand that OKRs are measurable and should be simple
It seems obvious, but it's not. OKRs must be very objective and there are golden rules for creating them
All must contain numbers;
Everyone must be mutually agreed between manager and professional;
Each person must have a maximum of 5 macro objectives with 4 key results for each macro objective;
At least 60% of the objectives must be defined bottom up, that is, by the professional who will work on them (we will talk about this in the next item).
- Understand that OKRs follow two paths: Top Down and Bottom up
This is very important and we would like to emphasize. The traditional model of forming objectives and goals is done exclusively from top to bottom, often agreed upon in board meetings, without the involvement of the entire group of employees. We work with a different proposal: 40% are OKRs defined by our Vice Presidents and Directors, who give us the direction, while 60% are OKRs defined by each individual in the company, which defines how the path will be. For example: it _seria as if the president of a football club defined in his OKR the goal of "being Brazilian Serie A football champion", and the coach of that club, upon receiving 40% of this OKR (the direction is to be champion), defines the missing 60% that must be done for this to happen: "import established tactics from Europe, sign strong players, etc.". As you can see, the president should not think in details of how the club will be champion, but he should ensure that there is someone thinking about what must be done to make it happen. The same reasoning applies to any organization. In addition, if you plan to increase the engagement of your organization's professionals, try to involve them in the process of setting goals and be surprised by the results.
- Understand that OKRs are public for the entire company and promote everyone's engagement
The idea of managing non-public OKRs sounds as ineffective as reading a book in the dark. Keeping the OKR culture alive is everyone's task, and internally all Googlers (a term used for those who work at Google) register their quarterly OKRs on our intranet, making them accessible to anyone interested. By doing so, a feeling of engagement is created by realizing that all objectives are related both vertically and horizontally, giving us the perception that we are all moving in the right direction, as a great team. See the full article here.