Broad and inspiring objectives can help you to capture most work and projects to be done in the company and focus your teams on the main achievements!
What are the most common and impacting OKRs we have seen with our clients in various industries?
We have often seen these 5 dimensions of company objectives as a basic set-up and to ask the right questions for the upcoming quarter:
Sales & Revenue (What are the financial targets we want to hit?)
Internal Focus (Which processes, systems, etc. do we want to improve?)
Market & Products (Which new products / markets do we want to launch?)
Customer Experience (What are we doing for our clients in the next quarter?)
Employee Experience (What are we doing for our teams in the next quarter?)
It is important to understand that we do not have to serve all 5 dimensions in every quarter, it really depends on your organizations priorities. Some of our clients also prefer OKRs along key company projects rather than these dimensions.
For more infos how to set-up first objectives based on your mission, vision, values and strategy, please have at our latest blog: How to know what matters
Let us have a look at details in the 5 dimensions.
1. Sales & Revenue
Sales & revenue are typical must have OKRs for all profit-oriented companies and organisation (in NGOs it can be replaced by fund-raising OKRs). Some organisation further add cost key results to this dimension.
Sales KPIs are challenging to put as an aspirational OKR framework and often stay KPIs / KRs driven as overall numerical objectives which will be broken down to subteams and sub-values. Revenue could be split in different market, segment or customer KRs and multiple teams could be responsible for that. From a collaborative OKR point of view, it is important to connect most of the teams to revenue if possible, as marketing and sales generates the opportunity whereas operations and back-office enable the sales of product and services and customer service supports the client.
2. Internal Focus
A lot of our client companies strive for continuous improvement of their organization based on methodologies like Kaizen, Lean Management, Agile reviews & retrospectives, etc.) This is important work which often is not fully recognized on company level.
Internal focus are typically process, systems, knowledge and further improvements to get the company ready for upcoming challenges. These objectives can be motivating if they state clearly why we run this project and what is the future purpose or benefit. (E.g. why do we implement a system? What do we want to achieve with it in the long run?)
3. Markets & Products
This OKR is focused on how we prepare or adapt the right products and markets to be successful in the future from an external point of view.
Market & Products typically includes KRs and actions such as product development, project deliverables, MVPs, product launches, market entry initiatives, etc. to keep the organization competitive and successful in the future.
For more infos how to manage projects under OKRs, please have a look at our blog: Why should you manage Projects by OKRs?
4. Customer Experience
The difference to number 3 is that we are not asking what we want to offer to the customer, but focussing on what customer really needs and wants and how we can simplify their life or their customer journey with us.
This can be an infrequent OKR if customer experience is not a core strategy of your business and therefore will not appear every quarter. Customer Experience can include survey outcomes, minimum satisfaction thresholds (e.g. minimum 4 out of 5 rating) or first steps to understand and communicate with customers. In a more advanced setting, it measures the feedback of customer versus the action the organisation is taking to satisfy customer needs. For more infos on Customer Experience, have a look at our latest Asia PMO blogs.
5. Employee Experience
Employee happiness and engagement are directly correlated to company success, especially in B2C environments. This OKR make sure that we proactively do something for our teams to keep them engaged and see them as vital parts of our organisation.
This can be an infrequent OKR similar to number two depending on your strategy. Employee Experience can start with understanding your staff (e.g. ENPS surveys or thresholds as KRs), monitor overall satisfaction / turnover and really have great and regular initiatives for them.
Are you interested in getting your first company OKRs? Contact us at OKR Asia.