Human Resource Management (HRM) across multinational companies has migrated from using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) spreadsheets to OKR software to streamline the goal-setting process. The future-ready HR tool has become a powerful weapon to maintain confidentiality and secretly rate employee success with acute perfection. The upending strategy supports two key purposes: track organizational performance and monitor employee performance.
How do we know it’s popular?
To better understand industry trends and meet organizational needs, HRMs of leading global companies like Intel, Google, Twitter, have adopted OKRs software, which has majorly transformed their business functions and performance. And some of the reasons cited by these giant software companies are – crunching annual goals to quarterly goals, aligning individual targets with company goals, communicating company objectives, and building strategies to confront future challenges.
Areas where OKRs made Impact
Most misunderstand that OKRs help human resource people in stirring results mostly connected with compensation, but actually, the assumption is wrong! OKRs at the core help HRs to improve employee work performance through cutting-edge evaluations. In short, OKRs help resource teams to focus on collective commitment and performance. Moreover, OKRs have become a sound administrative tool for recruitment teams to determine what an employee is doing through an annual cycle.
Dangers of mixing OKRs with compensation might lead to –
Trivializing Targets:
If compensation becomes the sole target of employees, they would simply reduce focus on anything they wish. So, resource managers must leverage OKRs to boost goals over compensation.
Overstated Achievements:
To make an impression before C-suite leaders or Leads, employees tend to overstate achievements and targets even if they haven’t done any. HR managers need to be cautious of not allowing OKRs to be misread by employees for displaying low-key achievements due to ambiguous self-set goals overriding the value of the company – honesty and integrity.
Collaboration:
If we mean HR uses OKRs only to evaluate individual performance based on individual targets, and not on interchanging with other departments or groups, then it does not encourage any skill-building like communication, team leadership, and collective goal commitment.
So how can HRs make OKRs Work?
Human Resource uses OKRs intelligently to make employees understand their role and goals that in turn will contribute to a broader organizational vision and goal. The approach covers three underlying factors – alignment, transparency and purpose. The philosophy of OKRs is goal-setting but if a company happens to record 100% success, then the goals set by the HRMs are too critical and bold and that in turn challenges employees to gear up skills for better performance.
Trust Building
To achieve any performance/goal, you need to build trust in your employees. HR professionals need to build a sustainable trust among employees to increase happiness, motivation and satisfaction so as to cut attrition rates and employee experience.
Building Focus
OKRs also enable the HR teams to make individual’s goals explicit that they pursue in a more accountable manner and contribute to the wider vision of the company. This digital tool helps HR managers efficiently synchronize team goals into organizational goals.
Positive Atmosphere
Bringing uniform thought processes is daunting in an organization as the psyche of every employee is different, but the new-age OKRs tool comes as a savior to HR teams to foster a healthy environment among the employees who are ready to take risks, grow creative and develop new capabilities to take the organization forward.
Final Thoughts
OKRs tools have become more reliable and efficient to HRMs across the organization all over the globe as they power organizational goals and help maintain a strategy of evaluating employee performance and growth within the organization. Finally, OKRs have become a silver bullet for the future of work environments and have inspired HRs to add it to their toolkit.
