A common question is what are Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) and how is the concept any different from the current suite of metrics that are used within our organization. Many organizations are used to using the traditional and established balanced scorecard method and prefer to “spare” many aspects of the company from digesting how company performance is measured and evaluated by either the company senior leadership, ownership, or the board. This unfortunately does not create an environment conducive to holistic engagement and strong productivity. OKRs on the other hand create an ecosystem that allow all company staff to understand and directly see how they can make a direct contribution to company success.
Our response defines OKRs an organized system that identifies priority goals for the business and the inherent action that will drive business towards accomplishment of those goals. The fundamental elements of an OKR approach is to ensure that priority of effort is reflected across all layers of the company, top-down and bottom-up. Let’s imagine that a company wants to (Objective) “enhance the digital integration of healthcare services across Ontario to improve patient outcomes and provider efficiency”. It than creates the following metric to evaluate whether the objective was successfully achieve, (Key Results):
- Increase the percentage of healthcare providers using integrated digital health records from 60% to 85% by Q4.
- Reduce patient wait times for specialist referrals by 20% through enhanced e-referral adoption by Q3.
- Achieve a 90% provider satisfaction rate with the new digital health platform by year-end
- Ensure 100% compliance with provincial data privacy and interoperability standards by Q2.
These OKRs would then cascade down, with different departments setting their own supporting OKRs to contribute to these overarching goals. In considering the nature of the department, be it marketing, IT, or quality assurance, they’d select the “result” to which they can make specific contributions, and establish it as their “objective”. They would then substantiate their activity by defining their own department “key results” that would ensure that the objective is achieved. This would the flow downward into teams and ultimately individual contributors.
Let’s chat more if you’re interested in this subject matter…..