When Setting OKRs Is A Waste
Tell me if you’ve been here before. It’s the beginning of the year, when your company is starting to roll out its OKRs that trickles down to each teams. It feels hopeful that this year is going to be better than the previous ones. However, after months, the numbers aren’t going good and those that perform well don’t feel as impactful as they should. Hopes are tarnished, until the next OKR cycle, when the story repeats.
Yes, setting OKR is one of those things that feel easier said than done. Looks straightforward in business books that the higher ups read, but feels tricky in practice, let alone implementation. In theory, it should be easy, but why it isn’t?
In my experience, there are 3 things that are often done, that makes setting up OKR is a wasteful activity and the company is better off not doing it.
- Setting up too many OKRs
- Misalignment when trickling down OKRs
- Not regularly evaluating OKRs
Let’s go through the list one by one.
Setting Up Too Many OKRs
If there’s one thing that you can fix, then this is it. OKR is a goal setting framework. It’s supposed to guide teams towards concentrating their effort to things that are expected to move the business forward. As with many things in life, tell me what happened when there are too many goals? Yes, the focus is lost, teams’ bandwidth are wasted and in the end, business is going nowhere. Good job in burning whatever money left in the company.
To fix it, leadership has to be prudent in focusing which goal the company is aspiring to achieve come the end of OKR period. Ditto, the teams have to be very disciplined in prioritizing what needs to be done to help the company reach that height. There are no use to set up 5 different OKRs if they don’t help contributing in reaching the goal. Learn to differentiate between “must have” and “good to have”. Remember that the time to reach that goal is finite and short, make good use of it.
Misalignment when Trickling Down OKRs
A close cousin to the first one. Unlike KPIs, OKRs are allowed to be setup bottom-up, not just top-down. Meaning teams are welcomed to formulate their goals that suppose to help company’s OKR. However, this can be tricky, as it’s easy to mix up between things that can contribute and things that the team wants to do (that may not directly contribute to the company OKR). Sure, I know, the teams know their day to day operation and they know what to do to improve it, but being busy in things that are not even indirectly impacting the business, is not a good way to spend the company resource. Even worse, it can be a cause of burnout employees as personnels are working hard but can’t see impact of their hard work.
So, make sure that the team OKR is aligned with the company’s. Find the correlation. If possible, discuss with the higher ups and find consensus before committing to the OKRs.
Not Regularly Evaluating OKRs
Let’s be honest here, even when you think you know everything, there’s a big chance that the goal that you set in the beginning of OKR cycle, is wrong, inaccurate or not good enough. Hence, regular check is required. Make sure that each check should discuss the followings:
- State of each OKRs
- Progress of initiatives that support each OKRs
- How much impact is given by each OKRs
Chances are, an OKR can be good, its initiative is running well, but it feels unnecessary for the company, unlike as what was initially thought. If that’s the case then it’s valid to drop the OKR and let the team work on something else more impactful. It’s part of a learning process that respects the business dynamic.
This is also why rushing an initiative towards the end of an OKR cycle, to make good report, is useless, as we want the team do dynamically learn, not just a machine that programmed to reach its target come the end of a specific time. A team that knows business dynamic while smartly managing itself, is a key component for a company to thrive in challenging times.
Here’s to a productive 2025.
