Coffee with OKRs · 4 min read
Start with a quarter of an hour, not a five-hour course. Useful questions come after a month of work
Of a five-hour course delivered on the first day, about ten per cent sticks. An introduction that really works lasts from ten or fifteen minutes to half an hour and answers two questions: what objectives are, and why we introduced them here of all places.
From the episode · in Polish
The checklist point by point, and the moment the conversation turns
The episode walks through the onboarding checklist point by point: what to pass on, in what order, who does it in companies of different sizes and what to do when so many people join that you can't introduce each of them in person. It also offers an idea that works well beyond onboarding: a recurring quarterly meeting put in the whole company's calendar, which anyone can come to with any question about objectives. The part where the conversation turns and it emerges that this isn't an episode about objectives at all comes roughly halfway through. from 00:24:13
The recording is being edited. Leave your address and you'll get the link when it's ready.A new person gets a new company, a new role and a new way of working all at once. An elaborate objectives tool is then the fourth new thing in the same week, which is why we advise against one at the start of an implementation, unless it is genuinely simple. The urge to pass on everything straight away comes from good intentions, and we say so plainly in the episode: knowledge seems like a good thing it would be a shame to keep to yourself, so you hand over as much of it as you can, as early as you can. It ends in overload, after which only a fraction remains. A different order works better: the minimum at the start, a return after a month of real work with objectives, then meetings every two weeks for the doubts that have grown in the meantime. Those doubts are concrete, because they grew out of the work, not out of a slide.
And here the episode turns in a direction we hadn't planned. When you set out what a new person really needs to know, it turns out that onboarding into working with objectives is hardly about objectives at all. It is about where the company is heading and what matters in it, and it also applies to someone who will never own a single key result. Publishing the strategy on the company intranet doesn't take care of this. In one organisation, a survey carried out after the strategy had been written showed that the teams knew neither the strategy nor the company's direction, and that was the real reason the organisation turned to objectives. It is also worth checking what word the company uses for this. If it simply talks about objectives, don't force the acronym on people, because for many of them it is one more name to learn, not an explanation.
The rest is a matter of fitting it to the role. Someone who keeps the company's day-to-day running gets a surface-level version: enough to know whom to ask and where to look. Whoever will work on development objectives gets a checklist of tasks for their role and pointers on whom to meet and get to know. The hardest part, however, lies somewhere other than the definitions. It is the shift from thinking in tasks to thinking in business results, and it hits hardest the people coming from a culture of individual performance reviews, because a team objective doesn't measure their personal effectiveness, and for years that is exactly what was measured. If someone is uncomfortable with measuring as such, it helps to take a step back and show what data the company collects at all and what client segments it has.
Takeaways
Four things that make up onboarding that works
- 01
Two sentences to start, the rest after a month
What objectives are and why we introduced them here of all places. From ten minutes to half an hour, and the next layer of knowledge is added only once the person has done some work and has something to come back with.
- 02
A link to the objectives is not yet an introduction
Annual goals and quarterly objectives should sit somewhere the whole company can reach, and the tool itself needs a short recording or a session of a few minutes. Handing someone a link to a tool they have never seen adds one more thing to learn.
- 03
A separate checklist for each role
Not everyone will work on development objectives, and not everyone needs the same scope. Agree in advance, too, after how long you will check whether the onboarding has worked.
- 04
You can tell success by two things
Whether the person knows how to support the company's objectives in their role, and whether they have the conditions and the forums to review, draw conclusions and raise the alarm. Plus one control question: where do they get the data for their metric from.
The whole topic in one place
Why don't OKRs work in my company? An implementation audit
This text ends with one person and their first month. The broader question, why an implementation can stand still even though people have been properly introduced, is taken apart in the article on the implementation audit. There you will also find every episode from this thread.
Author
Lena Zhukova
founder; strategy workshops, quarterly sessions
Founder of OKR Poland. For twenty years she has worked with boards of companies from 30 to a few thousand people; she wrote dozens of strategies with them and helped implement them in more than 40 organisations.
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