How to create and manage your OKRs?
How to create an OKR?
Before creating an objective, you must have a time period created to put this objective in. The time period marked as current will be chosen as default while creating the objective
From the sidebar, choose OKRs.
Choose the time period in which you want to create this objective.
The create OKRs modal appears. Let us try to understand the fields present in the OKR modal
Objective Name - Title of objective you want to accomplish.
Type - Type captures the nature of the OKR. Choose
Organization if the objective is meant for the whole organization.Teams if the objective is meant for a specific team.Individual if the objective is meant solely for an individual.
Owner - The owner is the person accountable for this objective. The owner is expected to constantly check the objective's progress and update it. For objectives involving more teams, you can add more than one owner.
OKR Period - This is the OKR period under which you want this objective to be accomplished.
Parent Objective - This is for aligning objectives and must be chosen only for a nested objective i.e for an objective you want to accomplish under another objective. Read more about aligning an objective in the next section.
Mark as aspirational - Mark an objective as aspirational if you are aiming for a crazy, ambitious goal. These objectives are also known as moonshots and even a base score of 70% is considered outstanding.
Fill in the objective details accordingly.
Proceed to add the key results to this objective by filling in the Key result title, owner, start and target values, KPI metrics.
Click on add another key result to add more.
The OKR is created.
Adding Key Results
You can add Key Results to an Objective only if you are among the owners of an objective.
Go to your Objective for which you want to add Key results
Fill in the title, owner, start value, and target value details of the Key Results you want to add.
Choose the metrics you want to use for your start and end values from the KPI dropdown or create a custom metric of your own.
How to tag Objectives (i.e Org, Team, Individual)?
An Objective should be tagged depending on ownership of the objective. Tagging an Objective affects the visibility of it i.e in which tab of Objectives this Objective should be visible.
An Objective should be tagged as
Organization, if the Objective is a company's objective.
Team, i.e Marketing, Sales if the Objective belongs to a specific team.
Individual, if the objectives solely belong to you and don't impact the company.
Objectives tagged as 'Organisation' and 'Team' will be visible to the whole company irrespective of different teams to ensure transparency in the company.
What are cross-functional OKRs?
Cross-functional OKRs are the shared OKRs that facilitate alignment across different teams in an organization. They bring transparency, collaboration and clear dependencies among teams. An objective becomes a cross-functional OKR when multiple teams share the same OKR but each team has its own OKRIs(objectives, key results, and initiatives) that contribute to its progress. Cross-functional OKRs are the way to break siloed executions among different teams.
For example, an objective of type Organization to 'Launch new website'. This objective involves both the content team and the development team. Each team will have their own KRs to achieve this objective. This makes it a cross-functional OKR.
How to align an OKR?
Aligning an OKR establishes a parent-child relationship with another objective. We align an objective if accomplishing it leads to the accomplishment of a larger superior objective.
Consider an example Objective 'Launch the new product' which needs to be accomplished to achieve a bigger objective 'Skyrocket business growth'. Since launching a new product is required to skyrocket business growth, these objectives should be aligned.
You can align an objective by
Create the objective 'Launch new product'
In the create OKR modal, after filling in the title, time period, type and owner click on 'select Parent OKR'
Choose the parent objective and create OKR.
You can also align an objective by editing the objective and following the same procedure.
Once an objective is aligned, It will appear in the next level of its parent objective in the Alignment View.
How to see a user's OKRs?
You can view OKRs by navigating to OKR from the sidebar.
You can find your OKRs, your company's OKRs, and the OKRs of different teams present in your organization by clicking on respective tabs.
The visibility of OKRs is classified into
My OKRs
You can find all the OKRs that you are a part of in this view.
Organization's OKRs
You can view all the OKRs of your Organization here. All the OKRs created with the type 'Organization' will be displayed.
Team's OKRs
You can view all the OKRs of the chosen team here.
Search OKRs
You can search for an OKR by either its owner or title here.
See how all Objectives are connected
You can get a holistic view of how your company objectives trickle down into teams and employees in the Alignment view.
Click on alignment view next to summary in OKRs
Committed and Aspirational Objectives
OKRs are of two variants - Committed and Aspirational.
Committed OKRs are the OKRs that are reviewed and agreed upon to be achieved by the entire organization. These OKRs must be delivered hard and fast. If necessary teams are expected to adjust resources and plans to ensure the completion of these objectives. The desired score for a committed OKR is a 1.0*
On the other hand, we have aspirational OKRs which are the dream OKRs - the organization or teams need not precisely know how to achieve these goals or the resources required, and that's why they are considered aspirational. The concept of these OKRs is to challenge the teams and motivate them to outperform themselves. As Larry page says "If you set crazily ambitious goals and miss them, you'll still achieve something remarkable". Setting committed OKRs only, brings the team to a point with no excitement as they are sure of the anticipated results. Aspirational OKRs instead bring a spirit of enthusiasm to the team and pushes their abilities above and beyond with uncertainty in their results. One way to come up with aspirational OKRs is by asking the question. Aspirational OKRs are considered to be performing decent if they have an average score of 0.7* with high variance.
Progress computation
Objectives and Key Results in culture.easy are attached to a progress bar that displays the progress made on them so far. Though the progress that appears on Key results is calculated from the progress marked in the check-ins, Objective progress is calculated by the app, considering the progress of Key Results.
Objective progress is assessed in culture in two ways.
Actual Progress: Actual progress in the progress shown in the progress bar. You can also see the actual progress percentage right next to the progress bar in text.
Expected Progress: Expected Objective progress is represented by a grey vertical line on the progress bar.
Expected Progress Calculation
Expected progress in culture.easy is calculated based on the Start and End dates of the OKR cycle the Objective is in. On day one of the OKR cycle, the expected progress is 0% and on the final day, the expected progress is 100%
The same calculation is applied both to Objective progress and overall progress.
Actual Progress Calculation
The Actual progress of an Objective is calculated by taking the average progress of all the Key Result progresses under the Objective.
Consider an Objective with 3 Key Results with KR progresses 30%, 20% and 40%. The Objective progress will be calculated as
Progress of KR1 + Progress of KR2 + Progress of KR3 / Number of Key Results under the Objective
In this case, 30 + 20 + 40 / 3 = 30%
Status of Progress
culture.easy helps you assess the progress of your OKRs with a color-coded status label.
These statuses are automatically calculated and set by culture.easy based on the actual and expected progress.
If Current Progress = 0% , Not Started If current progress >= 70% of expected progress --> Behind If current progress < 70% of expected progress --> At Risk If current progress >= expected progress --> On Track If current progress >= 100% --> Done
Weighted OKRs
By default, an Objective's progress is computed as an average of its children's(Key Results and Child Objectives) progress. By providing weights to the children, different weightage can be assigned to the children's progress in computing the Objective's progress.
Weights to KRs are assigned in the order of importance. Weights assigned to the KRs of an objective must add up to 100. The progress of the objective is calculated by considering the KRs' weighted progress.
Weighted OKRs in culture.easy
Weighted KRs in culture allow you to set priorities to your key results. These are considered in percentages. The Key Result or Child Objective with the highest percentage will be given the highest weightage in calculating the parent Objective progress
To assign weights to the Key results,
Navigate to the OKRs from the sidebar.
Select the OKR for which you want to assign weighted Key Results.
A modal to change KR weights will appear.
Assign the weightages in the increasing order of priority.
Note that the sum of weightages must be between 99.90% to 100%.
The weightages are assigned successfully.
Let's consider the above example. Let the progress of each of them respectively be as follows
The parent objective is showingt the progress of 81%. Let's see how.
Parent Objective Progress =
KR1% * weight(KR1) + KR2% * weight(KR2) + OBJ1% * weight(OBJ1) + OBJ2% * weight(OBJ2) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 100
= 80 * 30 + 50 * 20 + 100 * 40 + 70 * 10 ------------------------------------------------------------ 100
= 2400 + 1000 + 4000 + 700 ------------------------------------------- 100
= 8100 ---------- 100
= 81%
Understanding the Overall Progress Summary
Overall Summary is the first thing you will see when you are in the OKRs tab. Summary helps you grasp all the important details of Objectives in one glance.
Assume this is the summary card that appears when you choose Company Objectives from the top tabs.
These are the details the summary card includes.
Overall Progress
Progress Over time
OKR By status
List View of OKRs
Alignment View of OKRs
Overall Progress
Overall progress conveys the current progress of the chosen set of Objectives. In this case, it says that the Company's progress of Objectives is at 72%. Here, Pace is the pace of progress of Objectives. It is Behind here i.e the actual progress 72% is less than the expected progress.
Progress Over Time
Progress Over Time gives a graphical representation of expected and actual progress through each day of the Objective Time Period. The gray line in the graph represents the expected progress and the blue line represents the actual progress. You can also hover on any point of the blue line to get descriptive information of actual and expected progress on a particular day.
OKR By Status
OKR by status groups the Objectives in the chosen tab according to their progress statuses. This helps you see which objectives are lagging behind, which are on track and which ones need to get started.
List View
This is the default chosen view to display Objectives. List view displays the Objectives in a vertical hierarchy. This view facilitates check-ins and other necessary edits to OKRs.
Alignment View
Alignment view helps you see Objectives of each team in an organization are adding up to the company's goal. You can also see how teams are aligning on their goals. Unlike the List view, the Alignment view is a read-only view and doesn't facilitate check-ins or any other edits to the Key results.
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