Objectives and Key Results is a popular management strategy for goal setting within organisations. The purpose of OKRs is to connect companies, teams, and personal goals to measurable results while having all team members and leaders work together in one, unified direction.
Originally implemented in 1970s by Intel President Andy Grove, OKRs spread across many companies, especially when they were introduced to Google by John Doerr. Now, OKRs are used by tens of thousands of companies from SMEs to Fortune 500. Google, LinkedIn, Intel, Zynga, Sears, Oracle and Twitter are just a few of the well-known OKR users.
The system does a really good job with many teams, but we were running a distributed team. Making new recruits feel a sense of connection to the company and amongst themselves is much more difficult than with typical employees. While the majority of OKR usage is quarterly, some companies will also set annual or monthly OKRs.
To satisfy our needs, we developed KROW – Key Results for Objectives Weekly that helped our team members by having a structured plan for every week and not wasting their time in micromanagement. We simply pick a goal for each week and then assign tasks to every person. The marketing positions we offered were Digital Marketing, Web Designer, Copywriter and Sales, so we created a list with related tasks. We wanted to ease their workload, so we provided them with the most useful resources available to help them complete their weekly tasks.