① When the OKR is developed, make sure it has a very clear goal to ensure that the team focuses on important goals.

② After you have OKR, remember that you need to communicate it to everyone repeatedly until everyone is aligned and focused on the goal.

③ You must devote time to achieve your goals instead of endlessly hoping for tomorrow.

④ Be prepared to fail, learn from failure, and try again.

⑤ Do not change OKRs midway. A set OKR will either succeed or fail. If it fails, you will learn from experience and do better next time. No team can set OKRs perfectly the first time.

⑥ Methods such as OKR are not to determine the goal that the company is most likely to achieve, but to identify the largest goal that can be achieved. Therefore, when formulating key results, do not use this as a performance appraisal standard. Will lead people to develop key result numbers that hide strengths. Failure to achieve all key results, or achieving all key results but having no impact on business growth is a failure.

① Every Monday, the team meets to take stock of OKRs to clarify the specific tasks they are responsible for completing this week. You can refer to this four-quadrant OKR display format:

② Every Friday, hold a "Victory Meeting" so that each team can present the results of the week's work and prepare some drinks and snacks to celebrate these results.

① Set multiple goals but do not set priorities for the goals.

② Lack of sufficient communication, resulting in other team members failing to accurately understand the goals.

③ There is no specific plan to implement the goals, but just empty talk about the goals.

④ Instead of spending time on important things, we did a lot of things that deviated from the goal.

⑤ Give up easily.

Quantifying the contribution of R&D to sales

1. All employees submit goals they think the company needs to achieve this quarter. This allows the method to be implemented smoothly, employees can directly participate in the formulation of company goals, and it will inject something interesting into the corporate culture. 
 If the company has grown in scale, you can ask the CEO to mobilize a team, or collect and organize through professional consultants and research institutions, and finally give the results to the management.

2. Management spends half a day discussing OKRs. Choosing a goal requires a process of debate and compromise, which is worth spending more time on. Then continue to set key results for the goal as a more precise supplementary explanation of the goal. 
 There are many reasons why OKR meetings take a long time. In addition to necessary discussion steps, the meeting is delayed, participants do not think fully in advance, and avoid making decisions. These problems can be handled by the human resources department in advance. You must know that the company's goals are the lifeblood of the company, and everyone must bear responsibility.

3. Management assignments: Introduce the company’s OKRs to their respective departments, and complete the OKR settings for each department. Department managers and members made the final choice through a two-hour meeting, by freely listing goals, classifying and grouping key results, and ranking by voting.

4. CEO confirms department OKRs. After the department OKR is set, the CEO confirms it again. If it is found that some departments have a deviation in their understanding of the company's OKR, they will continue to discuss it with this department through a one-hour meeting. Prepare to spend a day doing this.

5. Top-down association. When department managers convey the OKRs of the company and department to subordinate sub-departments, they then use the same method to formulate their own OKRs.

6. Personal OKR (optional). If the company requires individuals to set OKRs, do it immediately. Personal OKR needs to be confirmed by the manager. This is a great coaching opportunity and can be done one-on-one, never via email.

7. Plenary meeting. The CEO explains to all employees what the OKRs for this quarter are and why they are set this way, and then conducts exemplary task dismantling of several of them. When explaining, you should also cover the OKR summary of the previous quarter and point out the results of the previous quarter. The entire meeting should create a positive atmosphere and let employees understand that they need to take immediate action after the meeting.

1. Take the team’s OKR as a starting point and mark the confidence index for completing the goal. List OKRs to remind everyone (and sometimes yourself) why you are doing what you are doing. 
 Your confidence index is an estimate of how likely it is to achieve the key result, ranging from 1 to 10. 1 means you will never succeed, and 10 means you are guaranteed to win. When your confidence drops to 3, mark it red; when it goes above 7, mark it green. Different colors make it easier to identify, making it easy to cheer up your boss and teammates. Listing a confidence index helps the team track progress and correct problems if they arise.

2. List the priority tasks of last week and mark the completion status. 
 If it's not done, briefly explain why, with the goal of making it clear to the team what's stopping them from moving forward.

3. Make a list of priorities for the next week. 
 Just list three important items, describe them comprehensively, and focus on specific actionable steps. "Determining the development documentation for the Xeno project" is a good item that covers writing the material as well as multi-department review and voting. It also makes other teams and your boss trust you that you will actually get things done. 
 "Talk to a lawyer" is a bad idea. This thing seems to be completed in half an hour, and there is no clear result. It feels more like a link in something. Not only that, it didn’t even explain what to communicate! You can also add a few less important items that should also be comprehensive and worthy of being next week's items. 
 In short, the items listed here do not need to be too many, it is enough to plan the big items that can be completed in a week.

4. List risks or obstacles. 
 It's like an honest meeting where you can make a list of things you can't solve on your own but can get help for. There is no need to play the blame game like a child. Your superiors do not want to play your parent and listen to you and another person in charge blame each other. 
 Also, make a list of anything you know that might be preventing you from completing the task. For example, a client may be making excuses to keep you busy, or a tricky technical issue may take longer to resolve than originally planned. Bosses don't like surprises, so don't try to give them such "surprises". There may be more and better solutions with early warning.

5. Remarks. 
 Finally, if there is content that is not included in the above categories but you really want to add, add a note. “Finally, the young man introduced by Jim was recruited from Amazon. Thank you Jim!”

Multiple goals set

The set OKR cycle is too short: one week or one month

Use performance indicators to drive goal achievement

No confidence index set

Changes in information index are not tracked

Treat weekly meetings as debriefing meetings, not conversations

Friday is too serious

final advice

① You can set OKRs by year or quarter, but they must be related to the company's vision and mission. Mission keeps you in the right direction, OKR gives you clear milestones, and key results are used to quantify goals, allowing teams and individuals to focus on a challenging goal.

② If you find that you are passionate about doing things as soon as you get up, it means that you have set a good goal; if you are a little worried when you see the key results, then the setting of the key results is appropriate.

③ The goal of a good OKR must be measurable, challenging but not despairing, and you should have about 50% confidence in completing it.

① Before setting OKR, first clarify your or the company’s mission. It doesn't have to be elegant, but it should be concise, easy to remember, and as instructive as a program. It will remind you not to waste time on useless things. 
 The company's mission can be described in the following simple format: We (what value proposition) are in (what field or industry) (improving people's lives or reducing people's suffering).

② If it is a team, the OKR level should be set from top to bottom. Company-level OKR should be set first, followed by departmental OKR and personal OKR (optional).

③ The goal must be challenging so that everyone will go all out. Hiding strength is not the purpose of implementing OKR.

④ If you are not a company with multiple product lines, it is best not to have more than one goal, and do one thing well at a time.

⑤ When setting goals, you can collect the opinions and ideas of all employees from the bottom up to see what goals employees think the company should focus on most at the moment, and add their goals when executives meet. At the OKR setting meeting, these goals were reviewed collectively, duplicates were eliminated, similar ones were integrated, and finally the goals were reduced to three through voting.

⑥ After setting the goal, set 3 to 4 key results for the goal that can measure whether the goal is achieved.

⑦ After setting the key results, set an initial confidence index for each key result (that is, what is your estimated probability of completing this key result, the initial value is generally recommended to be 50%), and run it in future OKRs to track this number.

① The goal should be clear and inspiring.

② Goals must have a time limit. Having a definite deadline is more conducive to goal achievement.

③ The goal should be achieved by an independent team, that is, the execution subject must be clear.

good key goals

key results