Ultimate Guide to Objective and Key results – OKR Meaning and Examples
Do you dread setting goals for your organization as you don’t see useful […]
The world has seen many organizations and industries experience downturns as a result of the recession. When you point fingers at the external forces for recession and blame wars, politicians, or crypto collapse during the tough phases, you end up taking the easy way out. The fact is that it is up to the leaders to drive their business forward, no matter what challenge is thrown their way, isn’t it? Over the years, many organizations have come out and fiercely battled through the most challenging economic scenarios. How? Having an angle management system allowed these organizations to swiftly adjust and respond to the economic jolt caused due to one reason or another.
It is difficult to think of any quick fixes that can help an organization manage its way through an economic downturn. But there are numerous tools and approaches that are known to support organizations in becoming more resilient. Whenever organizations come out of a period of recession, the role of technology tends to intensify. Organizations that embrace change for ensuring consistent growth and greater operational resilience will always come out as winners during a period of recession.
During times of recession, it becomes more than paramount to have a management approach that is centered on attaining results. This is a time when businesses just cannot afford to waste time and resources on making wrong decisions, working with inaccurate directions, missing out on commitments, and having unclear communication between the different layers of the company, right? This is where the OKR program comes into the picture!
The OKR program has proved to be the salvation of many organizations during the recent periods of recession. Known to be one of the most effective practical management approaches, OKR management helps organizations in turning business strategy into measurable objectives. This vastly renowned approach has already been embraced by high-growth organizations such as Netflix, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.
OKRs stands for Objective and Key Results – provide the organizational teams with focus through the establishment of specified objectives that are then attained through certain tasks. Objectives are usually very fresh and are based on the latest information, allowing you to align everyone and shift efforts as per the need. It enables you to make your organization aware of what objectives need their focus, thereby parking the others for the time being. This makes the OKR program an incredible tool for supporting organizations to steer through the times when the economic world has been turned on its head.
Effective goal establishment and consistent implementation of OKRs work to encourage all types of behavioral changes across the organization and its workforce. Generally, it works in the following manner:
- Generating a sense of urgency – everyone gets familiar with the need for change
- Gives clear accountability – an accountable team of people to lead the change
- Establishing a vision for the change – the need for changing that stretches beyond facts and figures and is in alignment with the organizational values
- Spot blockages swiftly – determine and remove obstacles coming in the way of change
- Produce momentum – utilize communication, recognition, and feedback for learning from success/failures and celebrate progress
During times of recession, you need to have flexibility in the working environment. As explained above, OKRs are the route to ensuring that the business continues to be agile even when the road gets tough. OKR program pays it off in multiple ways for the organization. Here are a few of them:
Focus – During the times when everyone feels overwhelmed by trying to adapt to the challenges, OKR helps the organization remain focused on the business priorities that matter.
Alignment – Making sure that everyone shares the same mission and vision is extremely important during a recession. Through OKRs you can align the business priorities at all organizational levels to ensure that everyone puts in effort for what needs to be done.
Commitment – As the OKR program enables you to facilitate a culture of transparency, employees get enabled to recognize how their efforts count in the bigger organizational picture, thereby boosting their commitment levels.
Tracking – Measuring the outcomes of your business activities and how they are influenced by your employees tends to become even more important during a recession. OKR management enables you to do this by establishing a short cadence on the key results that are of the highest importance to the business and then letting your workforce march to that drumbeat.
Stretching – By working with stretch goals, OKRs allows you to make your workforce take that extra mile. This ensures that your business continues to drive forward and at the same time has the much-needed edge over the competitors.
Organizations that can leverage the lessons learned from the changes forced on the organizations by recessions will thrive. This is the reason that organizations of all sizes and belonging to all industries that embracing the agile OKR approach that ensures that organizations recover and continue to thrive even when the market gets disrupted.
Joy Of Performing (JOP) is one such OKR+ SaaS solution that has been helping organizations left, right, and center in embracing the changes and battling the challenges. It is widely preferred by organizational leaders that aim to scale up exponentially and have experienced a growth spurt – no matter what the marketing scenario is.
Do you also want your organization to achieve consistent growth and success even when the market is disrupted by the recession? Then make sure you reach out to us today!
