How Google sets goals: OKRs
Rick Klau explains how Google does their OKRs during a Google Startup Lab workshop. This is one of the most watched videos on OKRs that you will find!
On the day Google’s acquisition of FeedBurner closed in 2007, it was also the first day of a new quarter at Google. My new manager at Google asked me to draft my OKRs for him to review. I had no idea what he was talking about.
I’ve now gone through the process of setting my Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) 24 times, and each time I marvel at what an effective mechanism they are for focusing my effort as well as aligning my work with the company’s objectives.
OKRs are widely used and appreciated at google. John Doerr originally presented OKRs to Google’s leadership in 1999 when Google was less than a year old. They were invented at Intel, but were popularised by Google.
Some are not fans of OKRs though. Steve Olechowski, Co-founder, Blinkfire Analytics things they are too bureaucratic for startups:
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The OKR video notes
Though the video goes into more detail, here are a few keys to what make OKRs work at Google:
- Objectives are ambitious, and should feel somewhat uncomfortable
- Key Results are measurable; they should be easy to grade with a number (at Google we use a 0–1.0 scale to grade each key result at the end of a quarter)
- OKRs are public; everyone in the company should be able to see what everyone else is working on (and how they did in the past)
- The “sweet spot” for an OKR grade is .6 — .7; if someone consistently gets 1.0, their OKRs aren’t ambitious enough. Low grades shouldn’t be punished; see them as data to help refine the next quarter’s OKRs.
- OKRs are not synonymous with employee evaluations. OKRs are about the company’s goals and how each employee contributes to those goals. Performance evaluations — which are entirely about evaluating how an employee performed in a given period — should be independent from their OKRs
Performance evaluations — which are entirely about evaluating how an employee performed in a given period — should be independent from their OKR
How did or does Google conduct their evaluations when what you’ve worked on and helped the organisation achieve its Goals is not taken into consideration when evaluating individual performance?