The Basics of OKR Explained for Beginners

This post was last updated on January 21st, 2019

Basics of Objectives and Key Results

We know that running a company is hard and adding a measurement for its day to day operation is much harder, but that’s not a problem anymore, with the help of OKR (business objective and key result) you can measure the effectiveness and outcome of every goal that had been set. Also, if you are looking for an OKR platform, I recommend the Profit.co. It has the necessary methodology to achieve greater success, you can visit their website at https://www.profit.co/. However, before we go deeper, we need to know the basic and this article can help you.

What is OKR?

OKR stands for Objectives and Key Result. This concept was created by Andy Grove then popularized by John Doerr, who is one of the early Google investors. This framework is also used by Spotify, Uber, Airbnb, LinkedIn, Twitter, Dropbox and other fortune 500 companies. The main feature that makes the OKR framework attractive is its ability to help the company to define goals and track the outcome, a goal that is quantifiable not only on monthly but also on a daily basis.

OKR vs. KPI

KPI which means “Key Performance indicator” is designed to track and measure employee’s daily performance or their day-to-day work. This indicator is designed to monitor the effectiveness of each team member, usually the management used this to reward employees. The differences between these two are; KPI tends to measure the “health of the organization” while the OKR is measuring the “outcome of every goal”.

Why we need OKR

Let’s quote the words of Chen Rekhi, she is the Founder & COO at Notejoy “In the workplace, it’s a helpful tool to guide projects and initiatives because when a project pops up that doesn’t fall within our OKRs for the quarter, we need to decide what we want to add it in, and prioritize something down, or if we need to say no to this project,”. In this section we will look at how OKR can help the company, you can visit Profit.co for more information, I can only discuss here the basic.

1. OKR Improves Clarity

It can move and synchronize hundreds or thousands of personnel to achieve common goals. It also gives the framework and connects the company’s personnel on achieving objectives with a measurable result.

2. OKR Improves Focus

To achieve the desired result, we need to ask ourselves; Does what I’m doing, getting me closer to meet my goals? We know that, to be effective, it is necessary to check if we are in the right direction or in line to meet our goal. OKR can provide the framework that makes the organization stay focused.

3. OKR Improves Cooperation 

Most of the biggest results are built with collaboration, because most of the time we can’t do everything alone. With the help of OKR defining the measurable objectives, the team or employees of the company tend to increase their collaboration to achieve the desired result.

Conclusion

This indicator is used by some of the most successful companies in our time. This gives us a hint how important this measurement is. Perhaps, there are lots of indicators to measure the performance of the company. OKR stands out among them for its proven effectiveness and results.

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