A good start is to inform all employees why you deploy OKRs in your business and repeatedly communicate this purpose.
OKRs are a change program, and change-averse individuals in today's businesses often find it challenging to start paying attention to this expectation.
If you want employees to accept OKRs completely, the first step is to explain your business justifications for using them.
And "Because Google did it" is not an acceptable reason. What issues are you attempting to address, and how do you envision OKRs addressing them?
It would help to integrate OKRs into your organization's culture and daily practices to effect this shift. In other words, OKRs must compete against the deeply ingrained cultural patterns your business has developed throughout its existence. How deep? Very deep.
In articles in the section "Your OKR Journey", you can find what leadership and proponents of the OKR initiative have to agree on and prepare the stage for a successful start.
Your OKR Journey - before you begin
- Goal Scopes - For what or who do we set goals?
- Number of OKRs - How many Objectives and Key Results to create?
- Key Result Types - A healthy mixture of metric-based and milestones
- OKR Scoring (or Grading) - Do you score Objectives, Key Results, or both? How?
- OKR Cycle Length - How long will your OKR cycles run? All of them?
- OKR Tracker - Start simple, then digitize
- OKRs and performance reviews - How do you create a working relationship?
- OKR vs KPI - Can we use both? Yes!
- Alignment between OKRs - Do not cascade. Align.
- Meet in the middle - How do we set OKRs from the hierarchy point of view?
A good OKR coach will tell you that you can add more of your own specific agreements to the table.
Three methods you may take to make OKRs a healthy habit.
- Build on your existing behaviors.
- Facilitate people's access to their own and others' OKRs. Visualization of goals and progress can make all the difference.
- Start small! Achieving quick victories is essential for establishing any new habit.
