Gamification must be done “right” — in a way that motivates and energises users. It is a proven strategy to improve engagement among users.
How?
What’s the psychology behind it?
Continue readingGamification must be done “right” — in a way that motivates and energises users. It is a proven strategy to improve engagement among users.
How?
What’s the psychology behind it?
Continue readingPandemic, few experts argue, has slowed business growth for many brands. Cloud-native companies that have pivoted their business models have mostly thrived during the constant disruptions. History suggests that organizations that can flex, adapt to unexpected changes and invest in innovation through crisis outperform competition during the recovery. Institutionalizing innovation in workplace is necessary to remain competitive in any industry.
Wrapping Up
Identifying risks and predicting disruptions is not a gut feeling. It requires a comprehensive understanding of the entire value chain: technologies, digital transformation, processes, environment, and customers. The leading organizations today are building new levels of resiliency, institutionalizing innovation in the hybrid workplaces, and aren’t just dealing with the challenges of today. Rather, they have established an innovation culture that embraces changes that are yet to come.
Did you know that switching tasks in-between can also kill your productivity up to 80%? Don’t worry!
Continue readingJordan Cohen, a productivity expert, says, “In today’s complex and collaborative workplace, the real challenge is to manage not just your personal workload but the collective one.”
But why is productivity important in the workplace?
When a company is productive, it increases profitability and lowers production costs, which endorses proactivity and talent. The more productive a workplace is, the easier it is to establish organizational growth and create a healthy work environment.
Now the question is, what is the secret to employee productivity?
No worries!
Here are a few ways to make your team more efficient in workplace.
Ready to start?
To help you cut through the noise, here we’ve selected some work productivity techniques to make your team more efficient. However, let us tell you, this is not all. Here are some practical tips to increase the productivity of your employees –
As you can see, each of the components of the people management system is a strong lever in itself. But when they fit together into a cohesive strategy, they create an excellent team that drives the company to achieve its business goals.
Simple tools like workflow automation software can help everyone on your team become more efficient, even if it seems overwhelming. And as you and your team become familiar with these technologies, efficiency will become second nature and an integral part of any project.
Measuring employee productivity refers to the amount of work an employee completes in a specific period. It is essential for every business to measure because the company’s success and overall growth depend on its employees’ productivity.
Continue readingThe OKRs have helped us multiply our growth by 10 times. They have helped us to make our ambitious mission to organize the world’s information more achievable. They helped me and the rest of the company meet deadlines and measure what mattered most. – LARRY PAGE, co-founder of Google.
Faced with the success of Google, many companies adopted the OKR method thereafter. So, what exactly is the OKR method?
OKRs stands for Objectives and Key Results. To put it simply, OKR is a goal-setting framework that helps organizations achieve their goals in a measurable way and creates clarity and aligns everyone in the organization towards top business goals to drive better results.
In the book Measure What Matters, John Doerr explains that goals and key results are the yin and yang of efficiency. A goal without key results is just a desire. And key results without a goal are just to-do lists without any output. So, both need to be effective.
When getting started with the OKR framework, it is common to get questions like “what is a useful guide to OKRs?” “how to write a good OKR?” or “how to set measurable key results,” or ” how do I get a good example of a well-written OKR?” To answer these questions, we have created a set of examples on how to set OKRs, so that you can apply them as you start with your own team OKRs.
As said earlier, Google is a benchmark in designing objectives and key results. According to it, the attributes that should characterize OKRs are:
Now that you have some insight into the general guide to OKRs, we have shared some OKR examples below for different departments. You can use these OKR examples as guidance and jump-start your own team OKRs.
Example 1
Objective: Create awareness of the launched product.
Example 2
Objective: Bring an incredible amount of new inbound leads to the site.
Example 3
Objective: Improve our website and increase conversions.
Example 4
Objective: Generate more scalability in sales.
Example 5
Objective: Achieve quarterly revenue of 300 million INR.
Example 6
Objective: Offer an excellent after-sales experience for customer retention.
Example 7
Objective: Provide a top-notch customer support experience to increase customer base.
Example 8
Objective: Ensure proper support to the customer success team members to succeed and achieve company-wide goals.
Example 9
Objective: Improve QA procedure to leverage the testing processes.
Example 10
Objective: Improve QA procedure to leverage the testing processes.
Example 11
Objective: Enhance the quality of the product.
Example 12
Objective: Accelerate the development team’s speed to create more value for our customers.
To Conclude
Writing good, well-structured, and effective OKRs is not easy. Have the patience to run multiple iterative improvement cycles, and you will see what success looks like! Also, you can use OKR management software which facilitates access for all employees to OKRs, encouraging teams’ engagement, motivation, and performance.
For every business to stand firm, every company needs to have clear objectives and well-defined goals. These goals help organizations keep everyone on the same path and motivate employees towards their work. When it comes to setting business objectives and measuring business performance, the two most common acronyms of the business world are OKR and KPI. Let us dive into OKR vs KPI.
OKR stands for “Objectives and Key Results,” and KPI stands for “Key Performance Indicators.” One is about goal setting and execution framework, whereas the latter is a mechanism to define necessary measures to achieve success in an organization. Thus, comparing OKRs and KPIs is like comparing apples to oranges.
However, at times KPIs are compared with OKRs and create confusion as they both are management tools that helps in decision-making. So, in this article, we will explain the core difference between OKRs and KPIs and how you should leverage them in different approaches to get the best results.
OKR is a goal management framework born in the mind of Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, in 1971, to focus the work on the company’s main objectives. However, OKR started gaining popularity since 1999, when John Doerr introduced the OKR framework to the Google founders, who implemented this methodology and delivered tremendous results since then.
To put it simply, it is a way of internally aligning the company’s objectives with each department, managers’, and team members‘ goals, who contribute to the organization.
With this collaborative goal-setting methodology, companies can focus on the critical areas of business operations. Instead of creating dozens of goals and getting lost among them, the OKR framework focuses on a list of 3-5 goals (objectives). Under each objective, a maximum of 3-5 key results are set to measure the employee’s progress towards the objective holistically.
KPIs are the key indicators that measures the performance or growth of a company. While the KPIs have a long and illustrious history, the exact date and precise origin of the KPI are still unknown. But it is speculated that the practice of KPIs dates back somewhere to the third century when emperors of the Chinese Wei Dynasty began to rate the performance of official family members.
Coming to the business world, KPIs serve as the business guideposts for many companies. It consists of result-based tracking metrics that evaluate an organization’s performance and how effectively the business is moving towards set goals. Organizations can use KPIs to track the health of the business, projects, programs, or various other company initiatives at the strategic level.
For a business to establish what its KPIs are, you need to conduct an analysis of what it is delivering and how it can be measured. One way to do this is through the Balanced Scorecard (BSC), a methodology that will help you choose the right metrics for your business. Let’s look at some common KPI examples –
At first glance, two concepts resemble one another a lot. Both KPIs and OKRs are methods of setting goals, tracking, and measuring the company’s performance and successes. While both are effective methods, there is a significant difference between OKRs and KPIs. But before that, it is also essential to understand the difference between lagging and leading KPIs.
Lagging KPIs represent metrics that allow you to measure the result – the outcome of our strategy and efforts. It measures how well a business performance or system was managed, such as last month’s profit and loss (P&L) statement, the number of products or services sold, total incidents, etc.
On the other hand, leading KPIs are driven by metrics that correspond with the future outcomes or where you are likely to get to. They measure target values that lead to the performance of lag measures, measuring intermediate processes and activities, such as current ongoing customer cases, percentage of team availability, number of outstanding bugs, etc.
So, the KPIs (key performance indicator) consist of a series of metrics to measure the performance of a process, an area, or an entire company. KPI presents information about the efficiency and productivity of a business. Through KPI analysis, it is possible to determine whether progress is being made in the right direction or any new decisions need to be made to achieve the set objectives. In contrast, OKR is more of a goal-setting framework that aligns company goals with departmental goals with that of teams and individuals and ensures every individual is striving towards a common goal throughout the business quarter.
If we list the differences between OKRS vs. KPIs in a table, it will have something like this –
To better understand the difference between OKR & KPI, let us consider the example below:
The marketing team created a great landing page that delivers product value and converts visitors into great opportunities. Now the commercial team wants to take advantage of this potential page to generate more sales.
The OKR for the marketing team is to evolve their qualified lead generation –
At the same time, the marketing team has a lot of tracking KPIs or metrics to monitor. The KPIs includes are –
The marketing team continuously monitors all KPIs based on the business objectives. As the business objectives change, it is necessary to improve KPIs accordingly. In the example above, it is demand generation. It could also be conversion rate, social media followers/comments, time on site, customer acquisition costs, funnel optimization, etc. Based on the tracking of your KPIs and the results of the previous objectives, you can formulate the next OKRs.
Yes, both OKR and KPI can be used together while planning the company’s strategic goals since the two complement each other and help the company achieve the fundamental goals and serve as a starting point for better employee engagement.
Objectives and Key Results are metrics or measurements that outline the objectives and define the desired key result, bringing some benefits such as –
When it comes to KPIs to include in your business strategy, they bring various benefits, such as –
Wrapping up
In a nutshell, OKRs and KPIs work very well together. OKRs help solves problems, improve processes and drive innovation. KPIs help monitor performance, identify problems and areas of opportunity. Thus, it is necessary to know the differences and benefits of OKRs and KPIs and apply them correctly to go beyond expectations. This guide to OKR vs KPI surely will help you understand how both works in a larger scale.
In his book ‘Measure What Matters’, John Doerr, the father of OKR, mentioned, “An effective goal-setting system starts with disciplined thinking at the top, with leaders who invest the time and energy to choose what counts.”
To simplify, OKR known as Objectives and Key Results is a process of setting goal that connects the company, team, and goals to generate measurable metrics, enabling the marketing department to work in a unified direction to achieve the long-term global goal. Because, marketing is not just about repeating the number of leads, views, clicks, etc., that you need each month. It is about figuring out what you can do better every day and where you need to focus.
Every organization’s marketing department plays a vital role in promoting the company. They coordinate and create all the marketing materials like brochures, collaterals, e-books, etc., to keep up the company’s image and help attract prospects, consumers, investors, and the audience’s attention, creating a global image that showcases your company in a positive light.
The goal-setting method clarifies the team members on how to optimize their daily efforts in strengthening the brand name, generating quality leads for sales, or building marketing capability by using both digital and traditional marketing. Thus, with well-defined marketing OKRS, team members can connect to the bigger picture of the entire organization and strive for more success.
We have listed a few examples below to inspire you to set an OKR for your marketing team –
Inbound Marketing OKR Examples
#1 Objective – Increase the number of new inbound qualified leads.
#2 Objective: Set up a new inbound campaign.
Product Marketing OKR Examples
#1 Objective: Gather customer feedback on our existing product in the market.
#2 Objective: Introduce new products to the market by a well-written crisp marketing message.
Content Marketing OKR Examples
#1 Objective: Improve the content strategy.
#2 Objective: Decrease the bounce rate on all the published blogs.
Social Media Marketing OKR Examples
#1 Objective: Improve the brand presence and engagement in Social Networks.
#2 Objective: Boost paid users from social media.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) OKR Examples
#1 Objective: Become a prominent player on Google search.
#2 Objective: Improve ranking on top 3 untapped relevant keywords.
Brand Marketing OKR Examples
#1 Objective: Establish a strong brand presence.
#2 Objective: Increase brand communication.
PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Marketing OKR Examples
#1 Objective: Increase the outcomes of Ad campaigns.
To conclude, one mantra to set winning OKRs is when you are drafting an objective, first define a problem you want to solve, then try to phrase your key results with the highest impact.
Breaking down larger tasks is highly beneficial for your team. It makes actions manageable and boosts employees’ confidence. They will perceive that they are contributing to a larger goal and feel more motivated to achieve the key results to make the company successful.