Objectives and Key Results, also referred to as OKRs, are one of the most effective frameworks for a successful strategy execution for any business. For the success of your organization, it is significant that each of your team and employees work unitedly to achieve the business’s top priorities. If you are committed to establishing a high-performance culture, engaged workforce, and a consistently growing business, you have to prioritize getting the best OKR software, isn’t it? However, are you having trouble deciding which OKR software to use best fits the needs of your organization? If the answer is yes, then look no further from here!
OKR is one of the most effective and embraced frameworks that helps organizations execute their strategies effectively. Yes, this OKR management approach is the same approach that Google and Intel adopted to drive their organization toward enormous success. Not to forget, by getting the best OKR software centric to their business, LinkedIn managed to gain a market capitalization of more than $20 billion. No wonder the significance of getting your organization started with the OKR management framework can not be stated enough.
Reasons to get an OKR software
An OKR software is made to assist you in giving the complete process of creating and implementing OKRs some structure. They allow you to facilitate a collaborative culture where employees break away from the silos to collaborate seamlessly to attain the shared objective. Simply said, using the correct OKR software has the potential to make the process of establishing high-performing teams and a successful organization easy to navigate.
1. Ease of establishing specific objectives
Getting the best OKR software will enable you to assign objectives and tasks to the appropriate team members in your organization. This makes everyone’s responsibilities and contributions to the organization’s success visible. This will inevitably boost your employees’ productivity, engagement, and focus. Moreover, your employees will no longer have any confusion in understanding their objectives, as objectives set through OKRs are always specific.
2. Align employees with top-priorities
OKR software applications assist you in directing employees’ efforts toward core organizational goals. These tools will help your employees focus on the big picture by putting overall business goals at the center of strategic objectives. This improves alignment by ensuring that individual and team OKRs contribute to the most important goals of your organization. This is quite beneficial for the employees, as well as you make them aware of how meaningful their contribution is to the organization’s main goals.
3. Visualise progress in real-time
The OKR tool not only enables you to establish specific objectives and assign goals, but it also allows you to monitor the progress of each OKR. You no longer have to worry about how much your organization is progressing on the set objectives. This means everyone takes a break from worrying about what might go wrong and concentrates on attaining their goals. If anyone is not close to achieving their goals, you can spot it on your OKR software’s dashboard and help them deal with their challenges.
4. Establish a culture of feedback
OKR success is determined by your ability to maintain progress and address challenges. A feedback-enabled OKR software application allows you to give real-time feedback to your employees, helping them toward successful OKR attainment. Getting a specific tool for OKRs allows you to facilitate a culture of feedback in the most effective manner. The word to focus on here is “real-time,” as giving feedback after a long period won’t have the same impact feedback is supposed to have.
Choosing the best OKR software for your organization
While you are on the hunt to get the OKR software that is best suited for your organization, it is crucial for you to consider a few factors. These are described below:
1. Ease of use
One of the most important things to look out for a while getting the best OKR software is to see whether it is easy to use. It should have a basic, clean, and clutter-free user interface that is also appealing. Your employees and teams should be able to use it with minimal supervision. The interface must have a design allowing employees to change and update their OKRs easily. Even if it is the first time they are introduced to the OKR tool, they shouldn’t have any hindrances in using the product and its multiple features.
2. Cascade and align OKRs
The ability to align and cascade OKRs is a function that your potential OKR software must have. To achieve the bigger company-level OKRs, teams frequently operate with shared OKRs. It should enable you to cascade OKRs from one organizational level to another. For instance, key results from your management team could be cascaded into individual OKRs for each team member. At the same time, the alignment feature ensures that everyone in the organization remains on the same page.
3. Enable transparency
As you know, transparency is a huge pillar of the OKR management framework. The purpose of using OKRs gets defeated if your OKR tool doesn’t make the process transparent. Transparency ensures that everyone understands which employee or team has been working on what. This leads to everyone remaining in tandem and alignment throughout the process.
4. A detailed dashboard
OKR dashboard consolidates everything for you. It delivers real-time information about the team and individual performance. The best OKR software provides simple dashboards with actionable data. It simplifies the evaluation and comprehension of OKR reports and metrics. By having a detailed dashboard, the OKR tool highlights the objectives and their progress and makes it easy to understand the current picture by just glancing at the dashboard.
Now that you are intrigued, book a consultation call with the experts to get the best OKR software for your organization today!
FAQs
1. Why should you use OKR software over spreadsheets?
Organizations decide to use OKRs because they want to add more transparency, accountability, and engagement to their organization. Not to forget, OKR is a very straightforward approach. However, all these purposes get defeated if one implements OKRs on spreadsheets as it makes the process more cumbersome, disengaging, manual and complicated.
2. Should a startup get OKR software or not?
OKR software is highly beneficial for startups as it allows them to embark on their journey toward growth on a very strong note right from the start. This ensures that startups reduce their risk of facing hindrances that can prevent them from growing and bagging their dream funding.
Gaurav Sabharwal
CEO of JOP
Gaurav is the CEO of JOP (Joy of Performing), an OKR and high-performance enabling platform. With almost two decades of experience in building businesses, he knows what it takes to enable high performance within a team and engage them in the business. He supports organizations globally by becoming their growth partner and helping them build high-performing teams by tackling issues like lack of focus, unclear goals, unaligned teams, lack of funding, no continuous improvement framework, etc. He is a Certified OKR Coach and loves to share helpful resources and address common organizational challenges to help drive team performance. Read More