by Jennifer Riggins

The Happy Melly One team has tried OKRs three times now. I’m not a fan and this blogpost explains why. Maybe by the end you can explain to me better their value. Or offer me a more logical alternative in a never-ending search to find motivating and transparent goal-setting.

What is an OKR?

Standing for Objective and Key Results, an OKR is a Management 3.0 Practice and an alternative to the more traditional corporate goal-setting of KPIs (key performance indicators.) Basically it combines qualitative and quantitative goals. For example:

• Objective = an unmeasurable goal phrase, like “Increase brand awareness.”
• Key Results = multiple measurable goals tied to your objective, like “Find and hire best paid marketing person someone by 31 March 2018” and “Create paid marketing plan by end of 30 April”

Last month at our retreat, our team of around ten remote part-time employees set our quarterly team OKRs — four objectives and 14 key results. Then, each teammate sets her or his own objectives that somehow support the team ones, and then, whenever possible, multiple key results to support that objective, usually between two and five.

Also Read: Jurgen Appelo’s argument for OKRs

Objectives are important.

While, as the Spanish say “Soy de letras” — a more eloquent way of saying “I suck at math” — as a marketer and writer, I realize how incredibly powerful goals tied to measurements are. There is a vast misconception that the roles I play are easy and that my creativity (and time) is boundless. Setting and measuring against goals is a great way to quantify what seems overly qualified, to give my work more perceived worth.

I also agree that as a company and as a team, you should set measurable goals so you are moving forward in a common direction. This is as important to my flat team as to a traditional corporate hierarchy. What’s also important is that everyone on a team is part of setting these goals, as well as we set individual goals. Finally, it’s essential that pay and reward systems are absolutely not tied to goals, as that’s known to deplete creativity, innovation, and motivation, plus it’s just rude.

What I do like about our current OKR scheme — if we stick to it and everyone really participates in it (but that’s another remote freelancer team challenge for another day) — is that we revisit our own goals every week, and, ideally, we will revisit the company goals monthly. This means we are measuring our work. I think this is essential to not only stay focused on a shared set of goals and a shared vision, but also that we are just measuring our own work. During the almost one-year transition from Jurgen Appelo as our leader, we were left with a leadership vacuum. We didn’t set 2017 goals and I think it left us more running the engine rather than moving forward together.

And particular to our team, I think it’s also important that we test out all the Management 3.0 Practices that we can, but we can, but that doesn’t mean we have to commit to them all.

Get to know more practices during a Management 3.0 Foundation Workshop

I think what bothers me most about OKRs is their supposed un-achievability. As I understand them, you should aim too high. You have successfully met your Objective when your Key Results achieve on average 60 to 70 percent of the set goals. Call me Type A or Overachiever (terms usually negatively allotted only to ambitious women) but what’s the point of an unattainable goal? For me, it’s like checking off a list or the satisfaction of the superfluous Kanban column of Done — I find pleasure in task completion and goal achievement. And I think for a lot of people, meeting or exceeding goals set is an important motivator.

But as Jurgen writes: “Each objective should be ambitious and feel a bit uncomfortable. You must feel like, ‘Gosh, I don’t know if I’m able to do this.’ Because, if you don’t aim high, you won’t rise fast. That’s why some people refer to such objectives as stretch goals.”

Maybe I’m missing the point of this argument? Like “Dream big or go home”? Maybe I’m just a realist. I’m all for increasing our goals, but incrementally.

Burn me twice, shame on you?

As the saying goes, burn me once, shame on you, burn me twice, shame on me. Now we are just starting with OKRs this second third time, so I may be jumping ahead, so let’s review how the Happy Melly-Management 3.0 team has finagled our version of OKRs.

My ex-colleague, still-rockstar Louise already wrote about our floundering with our 2015 OKRs. Part of the problem was and still is that many — particularly those not from the more rigid world of Scrum — experience difficulties quantifying roles or tying own objectives to team ones. Of course, also with a flat team, roles may vary making individual goals vague and fluid. But who’s to say that OKRs can’t evolve?

As Louise writes: “Unless you have a clear vision of your role within a company, it’s pretty damn impossible to set OKRs. The first quarter was all about learning our role in the team. I put a lot of effort into producing 13 OKRs, which in the end, had very little to do with the role I ended up playing.”

Then by 2016, no longer a rookie agency, we had our roles and goals a bit clearer. This time, Jurgen had created our overall team goals. However, we didn’t come up with individual goals, but rather those based on Functions, which could be fulfilled by one or more team member, like Marketing and Social Media, of which I was lead so was to create those OKRs while getting feedback from other people who showed an interest in this function by tagging themselves on a Trello card.

As you can see below, referencing both team and function goals, our key results weren’t precise numbers, but rather ranges of Good to Bad. As you can also see, we reviewed those ORKs quarterly and not even completely. (However, I’m confident that our ever-improving event management tool Workshop Butler will help us do that better this time.)

For me, even quarterly, it was exhausting to measure the goals, but maybe that was because my goals were too precise (and certainly only tied to my individual work.) I also set myself goals that some of which I didn’t even know how to measure. Maybe some sort of automation would have helped? But these were faults not necessarily with OKRs as a practice, but with my own goal-setting. On the other hand, I enjoyed that, to me, “Good” or “Great” meant solid objectives you worked to achieve.

Now fast-forward to 2018, and we’re trying Quarterly OKRs again. This time in a simpler shared view Google spreadsheet. And we are (or should be) tracking our results weekly. I’m still a bit fuzzy on some of the math. And I definitely didn’t “do it right” because each of my quarterly key results are actually achievable — and I intend to achieve them, which basically means I’m doing more my own thing than dogfooding the practice. Below* you can see mine.

After two meetings, the spreadsheet is dotted with question marks and blanks, meaning not everyone has bought into the OKR process again or not everyone is clear on it. To add to this, we actually haven’t determined who is in charge of measuring our team key results (finger to nose, “Not it!”), so team key results have two blank weeks so far, and we are running the risk of working on individual goals, but not the team ones.

As I write this, maybe I’m frustrated that somehow — again — I’ve given myself more work since all of the Q12018 team objectives are directly or indirectly tied to my role, including two very arduous objectives around increasing brand recognition, something that could be a couple full-time roles unto itself.

Also — and while I admit we had scarce time in our two and a half days in Lisbon together — we kind of ignored our more administrative roles and goals. We admitted that some accounting and adhering to GDPR (European privacy requirements) before May are essential, we didn’t acknowledge them with objectives, frankly, because they aren’t as shiny. I would have liked us to have dogfooded Martie the Management Monster and created an “Improve everything” objective, which encompasses compliance and workflow automation and acknowledges the importance of our more administrative teammates. As I mentioned above, I think at least sometimes achieving goals is an important employee motivator.

So, there’s my less-than-rosy OKR experience. At the end of this piece, I’ll also include links to other people sharing their OKR experiences — the good, the bad, and the meh. But really it comes down to you…

What’s your experience with OKRs? Or what other team goal-setting techniques have you seen work? Do you think it’s important to aim ridiculously high or just realistically?

(*Sidenote: to help me achieve my first Key Result, you absolutely should sign up for the Management 3.0 Employee Engagement Newsletter!)

Further OKR experiences:

• Google’s internal OKR ranking system (2014)
• The results of Jurgen’s first OKRs through running (2014)
• Jurgen’s favorite tools for visualizing and tracking OKRs (2014)
• Ralph on going from OKRs to weekly tasks (2015)
• Video: How Google sets OKRs (2012)
• Superpowers at Work: OKRs (2015)

Important Editorial Note: (OK maybe just a pet peeve. The plural is always “OKRs”. “OKR’s” is possessive. The decade is also the 80s, and so on…)