Why should Companies use OKRs for Remote Teams?

Being a CEO of any company, you must have clear organizational goals to make the most of your time along with everyone who works in your company. That is where OKRs come in.

Objectives and Key Results or OKRs are tools to direct and execute the blueprint of the organization. They are implemented by deploying business goals throughout individual employees and teams.

Tech giants like Google, Spotify, Uber, Twitter, Airbnb, LinkedIn and other high-achieving companies are successfully using OKRs to speed up their performance.

What does OKRs do for you?

• Let you track where you stand and in which direction you are heading.
• Helps you focus on what matters more.
• Allows you to set goals and also measure those goals. 
• Accelerates your performance by proper execution of goals
• Provide you with a clear view of team performance.
• OKRs makes teams aligned and encourages them to tackle issues together.
• It also helps teams focus on the top priorities that are critical to the company’s success.

How can you get started with OKRs for your remote teams?

Whether you’ve been working with a remote team for years or just started, OKR software can improve your company’s operations and encourage all team members to stay productive. 

It will help you learn and adapt to changing priorities fast. 

With the mental and societal impacts of Covid-19, remote working can easily make your distributed teams feel isolated. But OKRs offer a way to keep your team aligned and engaged.

To get started with OKRs for your remote team you can follow the below steps-

Identify your organization’s ‘Objectives.’

Your objectives should be typically qualitative or subjective, ambitious, and time-bound.  

Set Key Results

To achieve the objective, you need quantitative and specific key results that can help you measure success.

Help your remote employees to be on the same page.

Aligning can help your remote employees know how their work ties into the overall scheme of things.

Are you clearly communicating your organization’s goals to your remote employees?

Make sure that employees have understood the goals along with your logic for the goals that you set.

Monitor effectively

Don’t just set and forget. Keep constant track of your goals and achievements. 

Using an OKR software will help you achieve it hassle-free.

Know how to set OKRs for remote teams.

Why use OKRs for your remote teams

OKRs require time and effort to be set, aligned and monitored. It is too much effort to do it all manually. An OKR software can be your rescue.  It can help your teams and your company build a high-performance culture through execution excellence. 

Here are the few ways in which an OKR software is going to help you:

Make the process of setting goals effortless with an OKR software

Setting the right objectives is the primary step to achieve more profit in any business. An OKR software can help you set the goals as per the requirement of your company with its default templates. It also allows you to customize your goals if you want.

You can choose to add a description under the objective to provide further context and set a date to accomplish the purpose.

If you find the whole process of defining which tasks hold more importance and which ones can be pushed behind monotonous, OKR software can make it easier and interesting for you.

You can create & align corporate, department, team, and individual OKRs with software. While the top management defines the Corporate Objectives, the various departments can create their own OKRs to further the corporate vision.

Set concrete, specific, and measurable Key Results with an OKR software

While managing a distributed remote team, you might have less control over what people are doing. Set and track the Key results with an OKR software to see if your remote employees are working on the right things or not.

OKR software will help you understand how your team has been allocating their time. It allows you to keep track of deadlines and measure whether you are on track, behind, or at risk of not accomplishing an Objective.

Help your remote team focus on the right things

The business scenario is changing, especially after the pandemic. And in such situations, your goals also need to get modified to fit the situation. 

With OKR software, you can track goals regularly. And make quick changes if necessary. You can also update the Key Results to match the situation. 

For example- If you’re in the travel industry, you will have to provide extra focus on customer services now.

OKRs will also help you understand what is best working for your company and what needs to get changed.   

It will add to the flexibility and fluidity of your corporate goals. It also allows you to account for even the smallest abnormalities that you would not have considered beforehand.

Fluid OKRs provides individuals with the freedom to course-correct and use new tools and opportunities. To managers, they provide flexibility to shift targets.

Set check-in frequency 

Get automated progress reports and establish a rhythm for check-ins. You can also track employee progress on goals effectively by sending a notification to goal assigners each time they check in on the goal with an OKR software. 

It provides a structure for regular progress monitoring and performance reviews. Seeing real progress and improvements happening will also motivate your remote teams to go above and beyond for the organization.

“Seeing what people are doing and having an automated report is a value in itself”

Most OKR software also provides team reports that you can use to keep an eye on the team’s productivity. Check-ins can also help you know what employees are working on and to provide context during 1-on-1s as a leader.

You can check-in on a weekly or monthly basis or every quarter to best fit your organization’s needs.

Keeping your team in the loop

OKR software enables remote teams to understand broader organization objectives. It can help employees to align their individual goals with company goals.

This will help your remote employees understand what roles they are playing in the success of their team and the organization. They will get to know how their contribution matters to the organization.

Transparency is the simplest way to earn trust 

With a dashboard facility, OKR software makes OKRs on every level visible to everyone. This visibility of OKRs promotes teamwork and collaboration among different levels of the hierarchy.

OKR software increases visibility into company priorities, updates, and changes that impact individual work. It will further help you unlock work autonomy. 

Tracking OKRs with software can make it easy for you to verify that work is being done without micromanaging. It will allow for genuine trust to be built between leadership and employees. 

Besides autonomy, transparency helps you hold the employees accountable for their goals. It encourages motivation among the workforce and keeps them engaged.

Get all metrics in one place 

OKR software enables companies to measure progress using hard metrics. With it, you can keep track of all the key performance indicators. 

With the help of the dashboard offered by OKR software, you can clearly outline the company’s top priorities and the metrics that need to be tracked to ensure success.

Most OKR software also offers cloud-based solutions. It allows all the data to be easily accessible for managers and team members alike.

What should you look for in an OKR software?

• It should help you to reflect real-time progress 
• Feature of integrating other tools
• Adaptable in small to large teams 
• The software should be User-friendly

Things you need to do to make your OKRs a success 

• Don’t set too many objectives.
• Keep your key results flexible.
• Don’t create objectives that will require people we haven’t hired yet.
• OKRs should be challenging, not impossible

Peoplebox – One Solution for All Your Needs for A Successful OKR Programme for Your Remote Teams.

If you are looking for the best OKR software for your remote team, check the peoplebox OKR software. 

• It is the best platform to bring out OKRs for your entire organization. 
• Extremely easy to onboard and use it.
• Allows you to manually update and connect OKRs with your daily tasks

Conclusion:

OKRs are essential to keep your team focused, inspired, and aligned by providing context and direction to fit their objectives into the company’s vision and mission. 

Since “Vision without execution is hallucination.” An OKR software will help you monitor and oversee how you and your remote teams are executing their roles for the company’s success.