A new release to close 2020 and plan 2021 with OKRs in Salesforce:
2020 has been a year of changes. The COVID-19 pandemic has made many organizations disappear while others have had to reinvent themselves to survive throughout a year marked by lockdowns and the sudden rise of remote work, that certainly affected teams across all business units and putting many projects on hold. But as 2020 comes to an end, with renewed hopes of a vaccine being available to everybody soon, and many organizations and teams increasing their remote performance, the pressure is set on the executive level to properly evaluate a difficult year and plan an upcoming “post-pandemic” year where the new normal is still uncertain but projects need to get back on track to overcome even more challenging times.
Wrap it up!
OKRs framework has a good mate called CFRs (Conversations, Feedback, and Recognition). It is crucial for your team evolution to talk frequently on 1:1 meetings and learn from the feedback your manager is giving you. Wrapping-up the objective is an important tool in the process of CFR.
Wrapping up a period requires preparation. Most managers find it hard to keep track of the objectives they have to evaluate and discuss with their reports and create a guide for the one on one they must have. With our latest release, they will actually find preparing for the wrap-up period is actually very easy. On our Tree View a manager will now be able to quickly identify which objectives need to be wrapped up, as well as the progress achieved on each objective and key result; and to make things even easier, objectives and key results that have to be wrapped up are automatically added to the next one on one meeting as talking points, with notifications sent to the one on one attendees informing them of the talking points. The creator of the talking points will be the objective owner-manager. Check our release notes to learn more about this.
Keeping track of what was done and what everyone can learn from it is usually left on a spreadsheet, in extreme cases, it does not make it to a piece of paper. To make sure your teams quickly improve and learn our latest release has significantly improved our Wrap-up module. A new option has been included to make wrap-ups more convenient for managers and employees. Now it is possible to wrap-up an OKR in a pop-up by clicking on “wrap-up” on any OKR in the Key Results tab. This will make it even simpler to promote the use of Axy OKR.
Ask around!
Part of wrapping up is giving and receiving feedback. A one-on-one meeting is a traditional space for feedback however we want to give your company the opportunity to ask the right questions at the right time and to do that we created the Check-in Custom Questions and Answers module. Our new feature will allow you to create questions on any subject to ask your employees at their weekly check-in. You will be able to set an initial and end date for every question, choose if the answer should be text, a picklist (list of values that you can customize), a checkbox (yes/no), or a number. You can even define if the question is mandatory or not. As your employees start answering your questions, Axy OKR now has an analytics tab where you can see a graph of the answers which makes interpreting a lot easier.
All answers will be saved as a text field regardless of the type you define so you do not have to worry if data is lost. Check our release notes for more information.
Plan a happy 2021!
Effective strategic planning is certainly key to having a successful business in any industry and country regardless of the size of the company and using OKRs certainly helps make the best out of this process. If you want to learn more about OKR Planning be sure to check out this post in our blog.
The main feature of our release in the new Planning module. You will now be able to notify all users about the start and end of the planning period. Ultimately planning has to be translated into objectives and key results, and our new release includes a new Quick OKR creation popup, that can be accessed from the myFocus, One on One, and convert to child objective tabs. The new layout includes the mandatory fields to create an objective (Objective Name, Type, Parent Key Result, and Period) as well as the fields to create three key results (Key Result Name, result type, and target result) this makes it very easy and fast to create an OKR. An option has been included to allow you to notify users that have not created an objective and key result during the planning process. This will help you get your employees out of their routines and spend time planning what is next.
You can find all the details of the module on our release notes by clicking here.
On our Goal Planning Best Practices for Newbies post, we listed five best practices advised for executives that are starting their journey on planning. The third best practice states that you should track and measure your progress at all times. Keeping that in mind our release has included an improved planning dashboard with all the information any manager might need to understand where he is at the planning stage leveraging on Salesforce graph visualization. Reports like objectives by the user by status and key results by the user by status will empower managers to really help out their employees to finish planning on time.
A report that deserves to be highlighted is the automatic vs. manual key results report that identifies the OKRs that use the Salesforce report binding to keep automatic track of progress and those that have to be manually updated. If you want to learn more about report binding check our user guide and all the reports available on the planning dashboard check out our release notes.
We have worked very hard on this new set of features to help you finish your 2020 on a high note and start a successful 2021. Make sure you have a meaningful conversation with your employees and learn about what happened in a year that certainly will go down in history as one that changed hundreds of lives but more importantly plan a new year using all the information available with clear milestones, measures, and leveraging on Axy OKR as the tool that empowers your entire organization to reach all the goals 2021 has in store for your organization.
