What You’ll Learn About Operations OKR Examples
After you’re done reading this, you should be able to create your own Objectives and Key Results that match where you want your team or organization to go. You’ll learn:
Why teams and people within Operations benefit from OKR
A great OKR example
The key parts that make up an OKR
Why you should focus on outcomes instead of outputs
… and more OKR examples for Operations
Why Operations Benefit From Using OKR
Operation teams’ main priority is ensuring that the company’s customers are succeeding in solving their problems. Something that OKR can help with.
First, let's take a look at a great example of an Operations OKR and talk about what makes it great.
A Great Operations OKR Example
Objective: Increase employee work-life balance
Key Result 1: Increase avg. work-life balance review score from 2.5 to 4
The Key Elements To A Great Operations OKR Example
Let’s go over why the example above is a great OKR example for a Operations team. Overall, a great OKR should follow the SMART guidelines of being:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Results-oriented
Time-bound
OKR Criteria: Specific
This example is concerned with employee’s balance between work and their life outside work. Areas like these are typically measured through employer review processes or employee survey results. Conducting these gives a great way of quantitatively assessing performance on this metric.
OKR Criteria: Measurable
Because we chose a dedicated metric, it’s a lot easier to check the box that the OKR is measurable. We measure work-life balance based on the survey score and agree that’s how we evaluate balance. There are plenty of other metrics to include, but for now, we focus on this one.
OKR Criteria: Achievable
It’s important to have achievable OKRs. They should always be ambitious, but nothing is more demotivating than unachievable goals. A rule of thumb is that the chance of achieving a Key Result should be around 50% from the start. If you reach 70% and above, it’s considered a success.
OKR Criteria: Results-oriented
Being focused on results is a very important aspect of OKR. It’s so important, that we’ve dedicated an entire section to describing why you should focus on outcomes over outputs below.
OKR Criteria: Time-bound
A key part of defining a goal is also defining when you’re expecting it to be met. For OKR, your goals are usually divided into different cycles and your goals should of course be reached within the end of the cycle.
Focus On Outcomes Over Outputs
As an Operations team, it’s easy to get caught up in focusing your day-to-day work on the outputs of what you do. Doing X gets us Y. But you shouldn’t do that.
OKRs are meant to force you to think about your desired outcome. Then activate the people in your team and democratize how you’ll get there. The key way to turn output-focused goals into outcome-focused goals is to ask “why?”. “Why do we want the output you’re describing?”.
“Negotiate prices on top 10 products” is a goal focused on outputs. Why do we want that? Well, because it’ll get us to a state where we have a more competitive pricing point. Voila, know you have your ingredients for the key results. To give more context, let’s dive into more Operations-focused OKR examples.