Unlock Success: Navigating Common OKR Challenges and a Strategy for Improvement

My observations from implementing OKRs

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What are OKRs?

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) serve as a structured framework that allows businesses and teams to:

• Set clear and measurable goals.
• Align individual efforts with broader company or organizational objectives.
• Track and evaluate progress toward those goals.

Initially pioneered by John Doerr, OKRs pair the objectives you want to achieve (such as increasing brand awareness or minimizing carbon footprint) with the key results that measure your progress (like driving web traffic or ensuring product material is compostable). By connecting day-to-day work to strategic goals, OKRs enhance efficiency, autonomy, and collaboration within and between teams, ultimately helping people prioritize their work and contribute to the organization’s larger purpose.

Challenges with OKRs?

In my opinion, approaching goal management with a project-like mindset would be beneficial. Every project has specific goals, milestones, and tasks. If a team is not working towards these goals, they either must stop doing their work or switch to a different project.

Treating a goal as a project means tracking everything the organization is responsible for. In this way, it’s clearer where the organization spends more time and money and can adjust if necessary. However, this requires a good understanding of the work, which is often untrue in large organizations.

In contrast, OKRs are an approach to steer the organization towards its goals. This way, management isn’t burdened with understanding the work; instead, they let the teams self-organize. In theory, this fosters more engagement; in practice, it causes anxiety and frustration.

Here are some challenges I’ve observed using OKRs:

1. Teams find them confusing, often caused by vague language.
2. They take a lot of time to implement and are counter-productive.
3. The team is more focused on finding ways to manipulate key results rather than achieving their goals.

Defining good OKRs requires thoughtful words and careful consideration of the “key results.”. Still, vague OKRs are easy to create, so people often default to fuzzy language out of laziness or incompetence and fail at writing good OKRs. Creating OKRs takes a lot of time, and when leadership pushes this to the teams, it takes away from their daily work. If the systems to report progress aren’t in place, it causes frustration because the team has to create and maintain the tracking reports on top of their day job.

What about alternatives to OKRs?

Wouldn’t it be easier if everything the team is working on was transparent so management could see if it aligned with the goals? Of course, this is easier with smaller organizations, but in large enterprises, it’s information overload, which is why they look for alternatives such as OKRs.

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When defining an OKR without taking into account the organization’s level of maturity it can lead to significant challenges. For example, it doesn’t make sense to create an objective that measures the efficiency of a widget if the tools or capabilities to monitor the widget aren’t in place.

Lacking the ability to measure and report on an OKR is counter-productive because people will inevitably look for a shortcut to report the results. Incomplete or misleading Key results become useless and lead to incorrect assumptions about the progress. So, setting an OKR without considering the reporting capabilities wastes time and money.

How to make OKRs better

Management often focuses on the “objective” and fails to consider the “key result.” When this happens, they set up the OKR for failure because the “key result” is unachievable or inaccurate; it is useless.

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If the ability to track and report an OKR doesn’t exist, management must consider how much time and effort the OKR will require. If the team has to spend a significant portion of their time reporting the “key results,” it becomes a hindrance, leading to frustration and low morale.

Key Takeaway

A better way to write OKRs is to equally weigh the importance of the “objective” and “key result.” The “objective” must have a clear business purpose; otherwise, it’ll be too vague and misunderstood. A “key result” must be achievable, at least to some extent, and based on the ability of the team to track and report on it. If management would spend as much time thinking about the “key result” as they do about the “objective,” they would succeed tremendously.