In business, what gets measured gets done.
What you measure and how you measure it, however, makes a significant difference in your organization’s success. Management software that makes objectives and key results (OKRs) transparent and accessible for your team members can significantly improve your performance management strategy.
Many high-performance companies credit implementing OKR strategies as part of their success. We could spend the rest of this article just listing the companies, but here are just a few that embrace the OKR process.
- Amazon
- Dell
- GE
- Intel
- Microsoft
- Netflix
- Salesforce
- Samsung
- Viacom
Google (Alphabet) is the world’s fifth-largest company with a market capitalization of more than $1.5 trillion. Larry Page, the co-founder of Google and former CEO of Alphabet, points to OKRs to help explain the company’s massive growth.
“OKRs have helped lead us to 10x growth, many times over,” he wrote in the forward of John Doerr’s book Measure What Matters. “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.”
In 2022, staying on track in today’s agile and evolving work environment will be more important than ever.
The Need to Be Flexible
We’re already seeing two major trends that have impacted nearly every business and forced companies to think more strategically and work more efficiently.
The first is the current labor shortage. If every one of the people currently unemployed in the US went back to work tomorrow, there would still be nearly 3 million unfilled job openings. Companies must work efficiently with fewer workers available. As companies shift to remote workers to fill many of those positions, companies need to have a centralized way to communicate. The right OKR software and tools create efficiencies and keep everyone aligned regardless of where they work.
The other trend impacting businesses is major disruptions to supply chains. This is creating long lead times for product delivery and creating additional economic hardships for companies. In both cases, organizations must adapt — either finding new and innovative ways to navigate supply chains or dealing with the resulting problems that disruption creates.
OKR tools can help facilitate innovative thinking and agile strategies.
The Benefits of OKR Software & Tools
When you employ OKR software and tools, you create a strategic framework for planning, executing, and measuring your progress against company goals. This makes it easier to monitor your goal setting, project management, and outcomes.
OKRs are easy to create, but tracking them is a different matter, especially in organizations that have multiple OKRs which may be spread across projects or project portfolios. Without a formal tracking system accessible to key stakeholders, it’s easy for the details to get lost.
Using the best OKR tools can help create team and individual goals to align your organization and improve employee engagement with company goals. You can also create a personal OKR for any team member as part of their performance reviews.
OKR best practices using the right OKR software can help:
- Create stretch goals to accelerate growth
- Improve employee engagement and alignment with organizational goals
- Promote innovation and different ways of thinking
- Provide transparent reporting on goal progress and attainment
- Create greater commitment and accountability
- Motivate teams by giving ownership of objectives and goals
Because OKRs measure shorter intervals for progress on quantifiable objectives and key results, organizations can adapt and pivot more quickly when needed.
Eliminating Manual Processes
Trying to keep track of all your OKRs and projects using manual methods is time-consuming and inefficient. Using Excel spreadsheets can be unwieldy and make it easy for information to get out of date or formulas to be compromised. OKR software tools solve these problems by:
- Creating a single source of truth with a centralized system for creating, tracking, and measuring OKRs
- Automating processes to save time and eliminate manual tracking
- Enhancing communication and collaboration within teams
Keeping Remote Workers Engaged
Using OKR software will be especially important for companies that have a distributed workforce or are managing remote workers. Analysts forecast that more than half of knowledge workers worldwide will be working remotely by 2022 and organizations need tools to keep their workers engaged and aligned with company goals.
In today’s environment, companies need to be flexible and agile to remain competitive. OKRs help keep remote team members connected in a centralized platform to stay focused on organizational goals. Because OKRs measure performance against goals over shorter terms, it allows companies to recognize trends more quickly and adapt as necessary while ensuring everyone knows priorities.
The Best OKR Software
Cora OKR software tools help you to plan, measure, and evaluate outcomes, so you can improve your processes and achieve aggressive goals.
Our clients see remarkable results when using our strategic planning and measurement tools. In fact, we guarantee a return on your investment. Cora OKR can help you achieve measurable improvement, such as:
- 68% reduction in systems used
- 50% reduction in canceled projects
- 33% less project management staff required
Cora OKR can also help reduce the amount of time it takes for reporting from hours to seconds and create significant efficiencies resulting in cost savings. When you digitize all of your project management portfolios, you create a centralized way to manage the entire lifecycle of your projects and portfolios to make better business decisions.
Contact the strategic planning experts at Cora Systems today to learn more or schedule a demo
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Watch our introduction to OKRs series
