The OKR Cycle: 3 Steps for Company Level Success

The cycle is three simple steps that are repeated every quarter: Plan, Act, and React. Company-wide Objectives and Key Results help align teams, ensuring all members are working toward the same goals. They provide clarity throughout the entire organization about what a company’s most important priorities are at the moment.

OKR is a goal setting method used by many successful companies around the world and especially in Silicon Valley. The famous one being Google. Read more about OKRs here.

In this post, you will learn the 3 main steps to set up OKRs at your organization and how to deal with each of them.

PLAN 

Phase one - dream big. This is where you want to pull out the white board and have a brainstorming session with your team. Write down everything you think is important and then collectively narrow it down to the top 3-5 objectives for whatever time period you’re aiming for whether these are quarterly or yearly.

Everyone should agree on your top priorities before moving forward. Be clear about which goals are attainable, even if it might seem challenging, and assign metrics to measure your success and define your outcomes. Don’t forget to assign the objective to someone on your team! It’s important to have a single owner even if there will be supporting roles involved to ensure accountability.

ACT 

If you aren’t having weekly or bi weekly team meetings, you should be! This is the perfect time to align your team on everything from their OKR updates to topic ideas.

Tracking metrics and sentiment, on pace/at risk/behind, gives you and your team time to correct anything that might be off track rather than waiting until the end of month or quarter when it is likely too late. Encourage your team to be honest and transparent about where they are because that's the best way to adjust and move forward. Follow up in a couple of weeks and see if things have changed for the better or if you need to take a deeper look.

REACT 

Now that you’re reaching the end of the cycle, it's time to reflect and react. Ask yourself, did we hit our goals? What worked and didn’t work? How do we take this and use it to build my next objective?

Use the lessons learned to set yourself up for success during the next cycle. This part of the process is often overlooked and you’re missing out on valuable insights by not taking the time to look back on what happened. This is why Elate can be such a valuable tool for organizations because it gives you an all-in-one solution to having all of your subjective information, the timeline comments, your results, and most of all a single source of truth instead of using a manual spreadsheet.

Now that you’ve completed your first cycle it’s time to get started on your next!

Stop using manual spreadsheets and start tracking your metrics in one place. Make data-supported decisions and build efficiency into your growth with real-time data powering the direction of your organization with Elate. Get started today.