Using OKRs in Remote Teams: A Comprehensive Guide

In the last decade, remote work went from an outlier to the norm in the IT and neighboring industries. Large companies are still pushing back for their employees to return to their offices, but it is becoming increasingly evident that this will not happen. Remote work is cheaper for both the employee and the employer, and at the end of the day, businesses vote with their wallets.

However, working remotely also presents some rather unique challenges. One of them is the lesser engagement of the average employee, which leads to a lack of initiative. Luckily, there are solutions to this, and one of the most reputable ones is the OKR framework. This extensive goal-setting tool has been in active use in Silicon Valley since the 1970s became a worldwide sensation in the 2000s, and is now ready to help you tackle new challenges in 2023.

This article will explore the benefits and drawbacks of using OKRs with remote teams and advise you on the best OKR practices in this situation.

The Common Issues Remote Teams Run Into

Before we are going to look into solving the issues, let’s take a look at the issues themselves.

• Communication Difficulties: Remote teams might struggle with communication more than co-located teams. Time zone differences, language barriers, or lack of in-person interaction can cause inconveniences and misunderstandings.
• Engagement and Buy-in: In a remote setting, ensuring everyone is actively engaged can be more challenging. Video calls can sometimes make it harder to gauge reactions and adjust accordingly to ensure buy-in from all team members.
• Alignment Challenges: Aligning a remote organization can be difficult. Without the ability to have spontaneous discussions in an office setting, getting everyone on the same page and ensuring alignment is a lot more complicated.
• Visibility and Tracking: Remote teams can sometimes struggle with visibility. If team members can’t easily see and understand what others are working on, it can lead to confusion or duplication of effort.
• Lack of Regular Check-ins: Regularly checking progress is crucial, which can be more challenging when a team is remote. Without a transparent system for regular updates, progress might not be adequately tracked, and course corrections may not be made on time.

As a wise man once said, “That’s a lot of fish.” Fortunately, adequately implemented OKRs are tailor-made to fix many of these issues.

What are OKRs

Originating from Intel and popularized by Google, OKRs are a straightforward, flexible, and highly effective framework for setting and achieving goals. OKRs consist of two fundamental components: Objectives, which articulate what one wants to achieve in a clear, actionable, and inspiring way, and Key Results, which are measurable, concrete outcomes that indicate whether an objective has been met.

An Objective, typically ambitious, could be something relatively abstract like “Increase our global market presence.” In contrast, Key Results associated with this Objective should be measurable and concrete — say, “Enter three new international markets,” “Increase international sales by 20%,” or “Acquire 100 new international clients.”

• [O] Increase our global market presence.
• [KR] Enter three new international markets
• [KR] Increase international sales by 20%
• [KR] Acquire 100 new international clients

Combined, OKRs follow the formula “I should do [Key Result] to achieve [Objective]” and serve as primary building blocks on all levels of the company’s strategy.

If you want a more detailed exploration of OKRs in business, we’ve got a 16-minute video guide on YouTube.

How OKRs Solve Issues for Remote Teams

As we’ve established, remote teams often have problems with engagement and task ownership — among other things. OKRs fix those issues by enforcing total transparency and accountability. Let’s return to our list and explore how you can tackle each issue with OKRs:

• Communication Difficulties. OKRs do not help here directly, but they enforce a regular check-in schedule — more on that later. With that schedule, team members have a much stricter framework, which codifies communication and sets expectations for how it will work.
• Engagement and Buy-in. OKRs enforce responsibility, which in turn promotes engagement and buy-in. When somebody is personally responsible for an aspect of a project, they are much more likely to know finer details about it — which will lead to having innovative ideas for improving it.
• Alignment Challenges: Aligning employees and teams around a shared goal is a key aspect of OKRs. So alignment becomes a non-issue as long as everyone follows the framework and the OKRs are updated regularly.
• Visibility and Tracking: Regular OKR check-ins solve the visibility and tracking problem, but you can even take it one step further with OKR Roadmaps — check out our article on them on Atlassian Community. This allows your project to be genuinely transparent, with everybody knowing how well every other unit is doing.
• Lack of Regular Check-ins: Regular check-ins are the core aspect of OKRs and one of the reasons why they have so much overhead on the managing side of things. However, they also give you the framework to set up regular progress check-ins for the whole team. And we can help with the overhead — more on that later.

OKRs generally ensure that every team member, regardless of geographical location, is aligned with the organization’s strategic goals. They establish a shared understanding of success and how to achieve it, effectively bridging any disconnect caused by physical distance.

Additionally, OKRs provide a collective sense of purpose. By accessing everyone’s OKRs, remote team members gain visibility into their colleagues’ goals and understand how individual efforts contribute to larger company objectives. This clear line-of-sight enhances collaboration, reduces siloed thinking, and instills a strong sense of shared responsibility for achieving common goals.

How to Implement OKRs in Remote Teams

As we’ve established, remote work has its share of challenges — communication difficulties, engagement issues, visibility struggles, etc. And while OKRs will help with them down the line, you should expect the implementation process to be extremely bumpy.

This means there’s a lot of pressure to get things right from the jump. That’s why we gathered our OKR coaches and developed an Oboard OKR Implementation Checklist for Remote Teams!

1. Determine the Company’s Vision and Mission. The Vision describes the company’s future state and should act as a guideline for the corporate culture, market positioning, and branding. The Mission describes the company’s business, whom it serves, what it does, its objectives, and its approach to reaching those objectives.
2. Based on the Vision and Mission, define the Company’s Objectives for the next year. For your first OKR set, we recommend having three Objectives or less.
3. Extrapolate Key Results for each Objective. Once again, we recommend having no more than three. You can technically go up to five, although the overhead will become more and more noticeable with each new KR.
4. Break the Company OKRs into smaller periods and align Departments around them. This subject is way out of the scope of this article, but fear not — we’ve got a whole OKR Breakdown and Alignment Guide on Oboard Blog!
5. Set up regular meetings with department heads to review and adjust OKRs as you go.

Of course, this is only simple on paper — in practice, each step on this list might take hours to get right.

The Best OKR Management Tool for Remote Teams

OKRs have a lot of management overhead — owners need to track their progress constantly, and managers need to collect that progress data and assemble it into streamlined reports, which analysts later turn into actionable data for the project manager to review. That’s a lot of work, especially as the project scope grows and more and more people get involved.

In the early years of OKRs, it was accepted as the necessary evil — after all, it is still better to spend a day each week going through reports than to have the whole project go awry. However, this is no longer the 1970s, and OKR management has gone a long way since. So, let’s automate all of those annoying parts of OKR with OKR Board for Jira!

The OKR Board for Jira is a robust tool that seamlessly integrates OKRs within the Atlassian ecosystem, enabling a direct connection between Jira tasks and OKRs with automatic status updates. It’s the top-rated OKR software in the Atlassian Marketplace and a recent Editor’s Pick.

It also features many awesome tools and options to make your OKR journey seamless and easy:

• Cross-project OKR Roadmaps
• Customizable OKR Dashboards and instant executive reports
• Automated check-ins and reporting
• Comprehensive Confluence integration via a free add-on
• Customizable OKR breakdown periods and levels
• Various OKR weights and types
• Public and private workspaces with user roles
• In-app notifications and reminders
• Public Oboard OKR API for data export

OKR Board for Jira brings enormous advanced opportunities, but if you don’t have enough resources for it — don’t worry! Check our ultimate guide on using Jira for OKRs within the native Jira functionality.

OKR Examples for Remote Teams

Before we leave, here are some examples of OKRs set for Remote Teams by our customers.

Remote Engineering Team

• [O] Improve software reliability and development speed.
• [KR] Decrease software bug occurrence by 25% compared to the previous quarter.
• [KR] Increase the release frequency of new software updates from once every two months to once per month.
• [KR] Reduce the average time from identifying a bug to issuing a fix from 5 days to 3 days.

Remote Sales Team

• [O] Boost sales performance and expand market presence.
• [KR] Increase quarterly sales revenue by 20% compared to the previous quarter.
• [KR] Expand into two new markets and close at least 10 deals by the end of the quarter.
• [KR] Improve the lead conversion rate from 15% to 20%.

As you can see, they are not that different from OKRs for normal in-house teams — and that’s because OKRs, when set correctly, completely nullify the difference.

If you need more examples, check out OKR Examples for Engineering, OKR Examples for Accountants, and other articles on OKR Examples on the Oboard blog!

Conclusion

In conclusion, as remote work becomes increasingly prevalent, it’s crucial to address its unique challenges. The OKR framework, a tried-and-true goal-setting tool, can effectively tackle these issues, fostering engagement, alignment, and transparency within remote teams.

In this regard, OKRs serve as a roadmap to success, aligning everyone’s efforts toward shared goals. By implementing OKRs, remote teams can overcome communication difficulties, engagement issues, alignment challenges, and visibility struggles.

However, the implementation process can be complex and requires careful planning. Our Oboard OKR Implementation Checklist for Remote Teams can guide you through this process, ensuring a smooth transition — while our OKR Board for Jira will make OKRs easy to track and manage. It also offers cross-project OKR Roadmaps, customizable dashboards, automated check-ins, and more to further power up your project management.

Ultimately, the successful implementation of OKRs in remote teams can improve productivity, engagement, and alignment, regardless of geographical location. So, whether running a remote engineering team, a sales team, or a whole project with participants worldwide, OKRs can help you achieve your goals and drive your organization forward.