How Google sets goals: OKRs

https://library.gv.com/how-google-sets-goals-okrs-a1f69b0b72c7#.oiq7kvle6

by tmlee • 10 years ago

31 5 10 years ago

library.gv.com

anw• 10 years ago

My current company employs the OKR method. The following points related to my experience with them.

There are definitely some good points to them. OKRs manage to delegate company-wide tasks down to their appropriate departments and individuals/groups that will tackle them.

They also can be a pain. We set our OKRs every quarter, having to base our work for the next 3 months off from predictions–what we (our boss and board) want to accomplish, what [we] think will be important in the future–and are locked into working based on those predictions for a whole quarter.

They also don't account for your individual tasks, but your "company vision" goals. So if your job mainly deals with day-to-day tasks, and you are given OKRs from management, then you are now burdened with the work of 2 people.

The article also states > OKRs are not synonymous with employee evaluations.

The unfortunate thing is, OKRs make a great shortcut to grading employee performance. For example, in lieu of an annual bonus, our company sets a max-cap bonus amount and divides it by 4 (one for each quarter). If you hit 1.0 (100%) every quarter, you get all of your bonus. But then there is the threshold certain companies put on an OKR, where if you don't make a certain grade, you don't receive anything. So if you hit .75 you squeak by and get 75% of your 1/4 of the bonus. But if you hit .74 then you receive nothing. And if this happens during Q4, then your version of a Christmas bonus has evaporated (along with that employee's morale).

I do think OKRs are a handy tool. But I also think it depends on the kind of company (or more importantly, the kind of leadership) you work for. If your company has clear goals, and your CEO and board have a good vision for what the company is, and where it wants to be, then it definitely will help steer everybody forward together.

tmlee2• 10 years ago

What is the size of your current company? Has the OKR setup been difficult. That is, did everybody wrote their OKRs?

I think in OKR speak, individual tasks can be in your OKR as well, it just won't be aligned with any team/company vision. If it is really important day to day tasks, then it might make sense to be in your OKR.

OKRs can be a great shortcut; in your example, it seems that the quantifiable key results set should be according to the ability/expectation of the employees (which is a guesswork) in order to be fair.

For companies adopting OKR, they would have to be aware that the other benefits (transparency, pushing employee's capability, etc) comes first over easy employee evaluation.

alexandercrohde• 10 years ago

Really? You think OKRs aren't nonsense?

Anytime you set an indirect measure of success, system-manipulators will focus on the metric instead of what that metric was supposed to measure. My experience with OKRs is that teams and individuals with OKRs will:

A) Game the system. (For example, at Zynga, one team set an OKR to "examine frameworks for such and such," since implementation wasn't part of the OKR there's no way to argue they didn't examine). Individuals will be incentivized to pick OKRs that seem hard but are actually easy.

B) Disincentivize proper behavior. Engineers are valuable because they are not robots. They are thinking, evaluating, reacting people. The best engineers aren't those who meet your expectations, they're the ones who upset your expectations by inventing a side project like gmail that becomes a portion of your entire company. Valuable engineering can take many forms (assisting others, preventing security holes, cheering up cynical colleagues, standing up against bad decisions), and almost none of them can be directly measured.

byamit• 10 years ago

The article mentions (and I agree) that OKRs aren't meant to be used for employee evaluation but rather provide a user focus on what they need to work on.

It's easy to lose sight of what your goals are when you're knee deep in a problem, so OKRs are helpful to remind you what you originally set out to accomplish.

tmlee2• 10 years ago

I think in OKR practices, hitting 0.9/1.0 shouldn't happen. Nonetheless after the first round of OKR evaluation, if the OKR that seemed hard turns out to be easy; you should be revising the OKR anyway (in your case, under a manager's watch hopefully) to pursue something harder.

How Google sets goals: OKRs

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