OKRs for Your Remote Workforce

When the global coronavirus epidemic hit the world, a tectonic shift came in the way of working, giving rise to digital workplaces. Remote and hybrid working models laid a novel foundation for work culture, which we are slowly but steadily adapting. But remote working comes with challenges that include collaboration, better engagement, improved employee productivity, and motivation towards strategy execution. Your employees feel lonely, and it isn’t easy to effectively communicate with other remote workers. This is where objectives and key results (OKRs) play a critical role, helping individuals, teams, and leaders adapt smoothly.

OKR Framework

An OKR framework is a goal-setting framework that individuals, teams, and leaders use to set measurable goals and track their outcomes. While objectives in OKRs define what you want to achieve, key results (KRs) focus on how those targets must be achieved.

Major Characteristics of an OKR Framework

• Individual OKRs must be aligned with the OKRs of an organization.
• OKRs must be straightforward.
• Every key result should have a metric attached to it.
• Employing an OKR framework brings accountability to achieve key results.
• Goals should be strategic, ambitious, and challenging.

7 Ways an OKR Framework Aids Remote Culture

1. Aligns Employees and Organizational Goals

The OKR methodology enables employees to concentrate better throughout the OKR cycle by aligning the individual OKRs to the organizational goals. If your employees aren’t certain their work is helping to achieve the company’s goals, they won’t be inspired to work, and their productivity will suffer. Make them focus on the tasks most important to your company’s success.

2. Encourages Team Collaboration

Once you have aligned individual OKRs with those of your organization using the OKR tool, everyone starts collaborating and contributing. Individuals may assign their task(s) to other team member(s) or align with others to interact and complete the task at hand. Team collaboration, boosted by the software, takes care of loneliness and lack of communication challenges.

3. Increases Workforce Engagement

Adopting OKR methodology helps leaders accomplish company objectives and increase employee engagement and, thus, accountability. Employee communication also furthers this engagement. Your workforce becomes quite engaged, owing to the goals they must attain, monitoring goal progress at the same time. Higher employee engagement results in higher productivity and a low attrition rate.

4. Enhances Your Ability to Adapt

With the help of an OKR framework, you can create short-term, quantifiable OKRs. Moreover, you can frequently go over the goals you’ve established. You can learn what works and what doesn’t. Moreover, when challenges are caught early, they can be resolved quickly too. You can thus update your objectives and key results. For example, you can work on an OKR if it seems too aspirational.

5. Tracks the Progress of Individuals and Teams

Your strategy may lack clear and quantifiable performance metrics. But, as you implement OKRs, you can achieve your and your company’s goals and assess your success on them through KRs. Key results have metrics attached to them. Remember, as OKRs are measurable, they can be tracked too. To get the best results, encourage your employees to track their goal progress weekly and report on it on a particular day of the week. The last day of the week is ideal. Tracking in the UnlockWorks product implies looking over all your OKRs and notifying everyone by updating numbers or adding comments on your goal progress.

6. Betters Transparency

Lack of collaboration affects work, especially when everyone operates from different locations. UnlockWorks enables employees to collaborate anytime, anywhere, and the transparency feature of the software boosts this. You learn who is working on what and how individuals and teams help to fulfill your OKRs. With this level of transparency, you understand the value of your contribution, ultimately making more efforts to achieve the overarching company’s goals. Using this tool, you see your progress on your goals and may access notes on a key result. Besides, confidence levels show how confident one is in accomplishing the key result on time, thus making the actual KR progress clearer.

7. Transforms the Culture of Your Organization

Think about OKRs in terms of how they affect an organization’s strategic execution rather than relating them to performance management. According to research, when you effectively implement the OKR framework, OKRs and a positive corporate culture permeate your organization. Besides, employee engagement is significantly affected by having well-defined goals. Due to improved employee engagement, a transformation takes place in the company culture too.

A sense of purpose, alignment, and transparency are keys to employee engagement. Adopting and implementing a robust OKR framework takes care of these areas.

Are your remote teams happy working?

Your remote employees can be highly productive only when they are happy working. As they put into practice OKR goal-setting methodology, remote teams align better. More collaboration leads to more engagement and a boost in productivity. As a leader, you must put adequate resources into setting shared business goals while enunciating them to gain maximum benefits from OKRs. If you have failed to succeed in your OKR journey or are new to the world of objectives and key results, get started for free and fulfill the significant needs of your global workforce.