Unispotter Culture #2 | OKRs
I already wrote an article a couple of months ago about how we use OKRs in our onboarding process. But I want to share a bit why we introduced OKRs in our company now almost 2 years ago and how it turned out to be driving Unispotter forward at a much faster pace.
January 2016: First hires
In January 2016 we hired our first employees. A developer in Estonia, an intern for operations and a marketer. So suddenly we had to think about how to keep the whole team focused. We had our long term goals & KPIs. Every Friday we posted our weekly KPIs in a Slack channel. So everyone knew where we are standing. So far, so good — it worked.
July 2016: More hires & problems arising
In summer 2 more people joined the team. And as we grew the team it started to get a bit chaotic and something was missing. Everybody knew our KPIs but it wasn’t really that we were completely on the same page where the company was heading. It was bothering me. The purpose and direction was missing.
August 2016: Solution
So I started to do some research and I found something called OKRs — objectives and key results. OKRs are a popular technique for setting and communicating goals and results. Its main goal is to connect company, team and personal objectives to measurable results, making people move together in right direction.
I already wrote about our 6 core values and mission. The fuzzy goal is a 2–3 year goal. At Unispotter we defined our fuzzy goal with “becoming the №1 end-to-end platform for the university application journey” — it is not concrete but gives more direction and leaves room for creativity and innovation.
Quarterly OKRs
We started and still use a google sheet (Ping me if you’re interested in our template). We have been following the core process rigorously: 3–4 objectives with max. 5 key results each. We try to really narrow it down to the 3 key company objectives every quarter. Based on our learnings over the last 18 months also made slight changes to our process. For example, in the beginning we had 2 full days of planning — now it’s only one. Or only recently we introduced our “fuzzy goal” as a layer between mission & strategy.
Obviously it is not an easy process to break down a strategic plan into the right quarterly goals but we get better and better.
We don’t use the OKRs to measure employee performance.
The point of the OKRs is to set goals together as a team, understand why we are working towards those goals and how everyone individually contributes to the company success. It is more like a lighthouse that gives direction and keeps everyone focused. Analysing and reviewing the OKRs weekly and quarterly also helps a lot to understand why we are on track or why we are not.
Together with the OKRs we started four other (and I think very important) things to make it work:
- Physical quarterly meetings / retreats
- Setting one culture OKR every quarter
- Monthly OKR meetings to review the progress & stet priorities (incl. report)
- Monday 1–1 meetings about last week OKR progress & Friday retrospectives
I will be sharing more details to these additional measures soon :)