This story shows what happens when people fail to see how they can contribute to an overall goal, and that good deeds are not always done with kindness. When we started assembling the roof, everyone understood why we were doing it, so it was all very passionate. But we had no experience doing these things and didn’t know how our actions would affect the goal of assembling the roof.

The key link

The reason engagement remains low is the same as Paul and his friends — the desire to make a meaningful contribution but lack the context to do so.

In fact, when employees can clearly see the connection between their work and the goals of the company, it improves not just employee engagement, but extends to everything from process improvement to customer relationship enhancement, all the way to the income statement, and ultimately to the financial results of the company. It is clear that organizations benefit from letting employees see how their daily work affects the company’s overall goals.

Join OKR

How do you illustrate the impact of an employee’s work on the company’s overall strategy? The best way to do this is to connect OKR from the top down within the organization.

Linking OKR offers many benefits, including the ability to facilitate two-way learning. When you connect OKR, you actually create a two-way learning opportunity.

How do I connect OKR

How deep to connect

The key is whether the opportunity is ripe.

We firmly believe that OKR must be linked to be effective and recommend that you actively but judiciously link OKR. “Proactive” means that you are doing this quickly and deeply, at all levels of the company (perhaps up to the individual level). However, we also use the word “prudent,” which implies that you have thought it through and are able to say yes to questions like:

  • Do leaders support OKR?
  • Is there a clear, clear strategic appeal to be drawn from the OKR at the company level?
  • Will we stick with OKR to manage our business, regardless of the initial results?

If you can successfully overcome these obstacles, then it is appropriate to move quickly.

OKR connects to an individual’s potential advantages:

  • Enhance OKR awareness
  • Increase acceptance and support
  • Drive a deep understanding of OKR across the company
  • Improve engagement
  • Training skills

Connecting to individuals may also have the following disadvantages:

  • Reduce engagement
  • Confusion about incentives
  • Lack of teamwork
  • Make the OKR a to-do list
  • There is no value

Ultimately, it depends on your culture and readiness.

Determine the number of OKRs

Your company’s OKR should include 2-5 goals, with 2-4 KRS under each goal. The range is still wide, so follow the well-worn advice that less is more.

It’s great to be passionate about OKR, so you may not want to discourage enthusiasm, but once OKR exceeds a certain number, your returns quickly diminish. Because it means you’re unmanageable and unmanageable, what you get is a bloated list of priorities.

Instead of spending a lot of time thinking about how many OKRs is the right number, spend some time thinking about how to get more focused, which is the original reason for setting a limit on the number of OKRs.

Get your team ready to connect

Even the best runners don’t just lace up their shoes and hit the road. Instead, they do some stretching exercises to relax their muscles and prepare their bodies for the challenge ahead.

All teams that create and connect OKR should first create a mission that expresses their value, why they exist and how they add value to the organization.

With a mission statement, each OKR Connection group must then answer a basic question: How do we support the organization’s mission and strategy?

Make sure everyone understands the highest level OKR

Connecting OKR can be seen as a more complex version of the megaphone game, but with a bigger stake.

When you communicate your company’s OKRs, make sure everyone in your organization understands them: what they mean exactly, why they were chosen, and why they are so important to your company’s success. Even if the highest level OKR you create seems pretty straightforward, with a clear purpose and meaning, don’t forget that other people will interpret this information based on their own experience and come to very different conclusions, which can lead to horrible misalignment of the OKR’s connections. Communication within the organization should be realistic, not exaggerated.

There is a tendency within organizations to seriously underestimate critical matters of communication, often by orders of magnitude.

The key to connection is influence

The bonding process should start with the top-level OKRs that are critical to your success.

All groups cannot be expected to influence every Objective of the company; that is not the intent of the linking process.

OKR does not require one-to-one seamless connections.

While copying and pasting the upper-level organization’s OKR might seem like a good idea for your Objective, it’s lazy and not very effective. Most OKR connection processes should be bottom-up, allowing them to showcase the team’s unique contributions. OKR should be “loosely coupled,” not “tightly coupled.” The OKR connection process with your supervisor should be a negotiation process.

The raise method

How do we do that? How do we do that? Some have people working with business units one by one to build their OKR connections. There’s a more effective way: crowdfunding.

Bring all teams together at once to link OKR. Send a representative.

  • The leader briefs your OKR journey.
  • OKR knowledge review.
  • Demonstrate the company’s OKR.
  • Drafting OKR.
  • Published OKR.
  • Communicate ideas horizontally.
  • OKR rework.
  • Published again.

Consistent alignment

Sun Tzu’s Art of War: he who desires the same thing wins.

For any multinational, local government, local nonprofits and street vendors, ensuring that employees are united around a common goal is a top priority.

The vertical alignment

Vertical alignment means creating the OKR from top to bottom, all the way to the employee level. However, as we noted earlier, this is not about the management team forcing new goals to the lower-level teams, regardless of whether they are necessary or appropriate.

This process should be loosely coupled, and through vertical alignment, we try to create a relationship between your team and the team you report to, and ultimately contribute to the success of the company as a whole.

The silo effect is very damaging to corporate performance: individual teams focus on their own success regardless of the overall strategic goals of the organization. For now let’s give the silos of these departments the benefit of the doubt; they’re unlikely to always want to be isolated from the rest of the team. In fact, a more plausible explanation is that they were never given a formal mission to show how committed they were to the company’s priorities.

Goals do flow from the top to the bottom, but in the process of vertical linkage, knowledge and experience flow back from the bottom to the top, creating a never-ending cycle.

Horizontal alignment

Since most organizations have implemented and are good at goal cascading, most people are familiar with the concept of vertical alignment or goal cascading. But companies also need another form of alignment, horizontal alignment.

There are many jobs in the enterprise today that require multiple departments to work together to solve customer problems or create new value for customers. A lot of destructive things tend to happen when departments are independent and run their own business.

Achieving horizontal alignment is not particularly complicated, you just need to institutionalize detailed communication with other departments in the company to identify substantial dependencies, and then ensure that both parties create relevant OKRs to reflect those dependencies. If you really need to work closely together to accomplish the same goal, you can choose to share the OKR (it should be a small percentage).

Verify the conformance of the joined OKR

OKR’s value to a company is twofold: it allows the company to focus on what really matters; On the other hand, by linking OKR, all participants can demonstrate their contribution to the company’s overall vision. Connectivity is the most important part of the ENTIRE OKR development process, so be sure to take this seriously and actually achieve connectivity goals.

Here are some factors to consider when looking at linked OKRs:

  • Target coverage
  • Vertical and horizontal alignment
  • Reasonable index scoring level
  • Strategic implications
  • Follow whatever rules you have established

conclusion

Inconsistencies, saying one thing and doing another, are very damaging to the organization. Linking OKR may not solve this problem completely, but it can greatly improve the situation.

When most rowers talk about their wonderful moments in the race, they rarely mention winning the race, but the feeling of being on the boat. When the eight OARS move together in the water, the synchronization is almost perfect, and the boat seems to surface at that moment, which the oarsmen describe as the moment of flight.