Do you have your North Star & Strategy ready to develop specific targets & actions for 2024? Is everybody in your company aware of your overall direction and aligned? Did you asked your manager and staff for ideas? Q4 is a great time to try OKRs or to get everything in place before defining and managing the OKRs for next year
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Try OKRs in Q4 as a pilot
If you are running on KPIs, Balanced Scorecard or pure action management, we would like to encourage you to try OKR as a top management or one project pilot in Q4 2023 to make an educated decision if Agile Goal Setting by OKRs is the right method for your and your teams. Focus on business outcomes rather than just work output can be also only work partially for some organisation levels or teams in your organisation and we can guide you which form and shape of OKR implementation makes sense for you in 2024.
Alignment & Feedback from your Manager & Staff
As part of Agile Management, we do not believe that C-Level and Directors always have the best ideas or most insights and we should leverage the knowledge and input of of employees on every level.
Therefore we highly recommend to send the Strategy and potential yearly Objectives for 2024 as a proposal or draft version to everybody in the company (e.g. by survey, townhall, etc.) and collect ideas before finalizing it.
With that in mind, we try to avoid the HIPPO trap (Highest Paid Person Opinion) which only counts or matters. We have run these feedback loops successfully in organisations and start-ups and beside the great feedback from all level to support your organisation, it gives you another way to easily detect and foster your highly engaged employees.
Run Workshops to define Objectives, Key Results & Actions / Projects
Our experience shows that 2-level workshops are the best to define the OKRs and the work input for the upcoming year and more detailed Q1 2024.
For company OKRs, either do a workshop with all C-Level or bring Head & C-Level together. Please avoid that only the CEO or selected member of the board are defining the company OKRs on their own. Often companies only define Objectives broken down from strategies and let the teams or squads come up with Sub-Objectives and measurable Key Results. Therefore the measurement and achievement part lies within the team rather than top down controlling KPIs from management.
Especially when it comes to projects and actions to fulfill the OKRs and achieve the desired results, we highly recommend to let your staff and expert brainstorm for the right work output rather than doing it by management. Ideally your recruited the right staff with the best experience to show you how this results can be achieved.
A workshop between different level creates buy-in and alignment rather than top down delegation and misunderstandings on OKR, project and action level.
For more information how to cascade OKRs and to create buy-ins on each levels, please visit our OKR Champion Certification program.
Be ready to work and measure your results in January
It is important that you conclude the planning stages for strategy and OKRs within 2022 and have a motivational and meaningful communications of the these targets in December.
So everybody can have a fresh start after the year end holidays and dive into the doing and achieving rather than dragging the planning stage to January like we have seen with other clients. We can support your to get ready on time!
For more information how to introduce OKRs, Project & Action Management and how to achieve a result-oriented and agile culture please contact us here or on transform@asiapmo.com
This blog was written by Carsten Ley, Entrepreneur, Enabler & Project Lead in Employee Experience, Project & Business Transformation leading large scale project implementations in Banking, Consulting, Project & Experience Management for companies like Deloitte Germany, VW Mexico, Rolls-Royce UK and Lazada Vietnam. He founded 2018 Asia PMO, a consulting firm focussing on getting clients fast and efficient into implementation of company objectives, customer & employee experience improvements to foster a result- and team-oriented environment.