Why adoption is so important?
Probably if you are reading this you already know about the benefits of using OKR in your organization.
OKRs are meant to be used by your entire team. The more OKR adoption the more you get from OKR superpowers: Alignment, Tracking and Stretching.
But this is not that simple. No matter how good is the tool you are using or the guy responsible to implement this practice in your company. It is a culture change and it requires time to establish deep enough to obtain results.
Usual pain points to break the inertia
Any organization has a culture, from big corporations to small startups, they have a bias that drives the day to day employee behaviour. We have seen companies buying a good OKR platform, giving a speech and just sending the user credential to every employee, expecting them to use and adopt it from overnight.
Those are the main stoppers you must think when you are planning to adopt OKR for your team.
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Training: Although OKR practices are quite simple, It is crucial to define a clear practice in your organization and invest time on employee training and follow up.
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Lack of interest if objectives are not tied to compensation: Usually teams that are motivated by compensation have a quota that is not replaced by OKRs.
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OKRs are flexible: There are many different ways to use OKRs. For instance, defining 100% of them as Top-Down is one of them, having 50% of approved Bottom-up objectives is other, having quarters reviews and many more ways to use it. Misunderstanding of how each organization level is implementing them is frequent.
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Set them > forget them: This is typical. Starting the practice full of energy, pushing the employees to define them. But after the first day employees never came back to check or update results. And this is maybe the main reason for lack of adoption in most cases.
OKR should be a pusher never a puller. OKRs should push your team in a clear direction, aligning them, should also push to stretch for amazing results. Should never become an administrative task for your team. In that case, OKRs became something that your team has to pull with them. That is bad.
Integrated Key Results and Notifications are the key
Cultural influencers
Organizations that have successfully implemented OKR have in common two factors:
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Strong Cultural influencers:
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By assigning one or more OKRs Evangelists within the organization or specialized consultants to drive the practice a couple of cycles.
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And a C-Level strong decision to adopt that practice that typically implies to base the company result on OKR and therefore push the entire organization to follow them.
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Integrated OKR Tools:
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Having a tool that is fully integrated to employee results will help you encourage the use of it and the constant checking on their progress.
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Benefits of integration
Having your OKR Platform integrated to real-time results in key in adoption as we mentioned before. That allows you to push on employees tracking progress and pushing notifications to encourage actions that eventually that will drive on improved results.
For organizations that use Salesforce this is great news. Since Salesforce as CRM is normally containing realtime information about main company processes such as Marketing, Sales, Customer Support and so on. By having an OKR Software within Salesforce will allow you to have a faster and more natural practice adoption.
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Defining Objectives in the same system the employees are used to increase their interaction.
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Binding Key Results to real-time reports as Axy OKR does will give you real-time progress.
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Relating accurate information regarding your sales, customers and actions to OKRs helps on the analysis and review for improvements that you should be doing.
As you can imagine we are proud of our Salesforce App Axy OKR. That was build considering the best way to tackle all adoptions issues any org mush face. Give it a try, it is free the 30 days trial on Appexchange.
Making OKR a habit
After adoption, the OKR habit will come, and eventually, success will come. Keep it doing great on your strategic and tactical goals setting.
Axy Team
