In October 2019, a J.P Morgan survey found that Asia Pacific (APAC) business decision-makers saw a global recession and trade tariffs as the biggest risks for their companies in the next six to 12 months.

With the ongoing trade war having created uncertainty in global markets and supply chains while posing recession risks, it was no wonder that C-suites felt businesses were facing increased risks as they headed into 2020.

Separate from that, an EY report found that APAC businesses were losing the digital transformation race deemed necessary to stay afloat in an Industry 4.0 world.

EY Asia-Pacific technology consulting leader Steve Bingham said, “in a dynamic business environment, it doesn’t matter whether the disruption is a global health pandemic or new competition, bushfires, or Brexit. Agile, adaptable businesses with advanced digital capabilities are best positioned to weather any storm and create long term value.”

Never have those words been truer than now in March 2020, as major cities enter some form of lockdown and shuttering millions of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) as well as large corporates. It is important to underscore that businesses need to continue operating in the new work-from-home norm and prepare their organisations, employees, and systems to not just survive the lockdowns, but emerge more agile.

What are OKRs?

In the 1970s, the then-president of Intel, Andy Grove designed OKRs (Objective and Key Results) to guide Intel’s transition from a memory company to a microprocessor company. According to re:Work, OKRs helped employees focus on a set of priorities: communicate priorities, maintain alignment, and make the switch.

OKRs were introduced to Google in the 2000s by investor John Doerr. Alphabet CEO and Google co-founder Larry Page said, “OKRs have helped lead us to 10x growth, many times over. They’ve helped make our crazily bold mission of ‘organizing the world’s information’ perhaps even achievable. They’ve kept me and the rest of the company on time and on track when it mattered the most.”

OKRs provide a simple and powerful approach to set business targets, measure progress and achieve greater success. While key performance indicators (KPIs) measure a single aspect of a business, OKRs help put KPIs and other targets in the wider organisational perspective.

Google, for instance, uses OKRs to set ambitious goals and make them public so employees at every level have buy-in and know the reasoning behind their individual, departmental, and regional OKRs as they pertain to the entire company.

While KPIs alone may reflect a silo-like working environment, OKRs can help teams and individuals get outside of their comfort zones, prioritize work, and learn from both success and failure.

For example, OKRs can encompass both non-KPI key results (such as hiring a VP of sales) and actual, quantifiable KPIs (increase online leads and lead to demo conversions).

So, what is OKR? OKRs, as the name goes, comprises two elements:

1.) Objective: what you want to accomplish on whatever scale and timeline.

2.) Key Results: the term refers to the actionable steps — whose effectiveness can be measured — that form the plan of action to reach the objective.

There are five key OKR payoffs: narrowing the organisational focus on a certain number of objectives as well as a number of key results per objective, alignment of objectives due to the public nature of OKRs, commitment by employees who set up their own OKRs, tracking of OKRs at any point, and stretching of OKRs across the organisation for more ambitious goals.

Why OKRs? Why now?

In 2013, American retailer Sears adopted OKRs in their sales team, which resulted in average sales per hour rising from $14.44 to $15.67, or an average increase of 8.5% over 18 months. This, extrapolated into monthly and annual sales, was a significant jump in productivity.

Meanwhile, Google has grown from a company of 40 employees in 2000 to over 100,000 staff in 2020. OKRs have helped put growth in perspective, especially across new product roll-outs or market expansions.

For a smaller company experiencing an influx in new employees, the public and self-driven nature of OKRs can more quickly facilitate employee buy-in and assimilation into the corporate culture.

In the ever-changing business climate, OKRs help keep companies focused on its stated vision and mission. The ability to track, grade, and update OKRs regularly can also inform employees at every level how a company is cohesively reacting to challenges like digital transformation, trade wars, and pandemics.

For example, one’s objective to increase sales by 10% may need to be updated due to depressed consumer demand, and key results under the objective will need to be upgraded to focus more on online channels for customer outreach.

Due to the wide-ranging nature of OKRs as well as the fluid nature of the business environment, communicating across all levels of the company, the need to update and align OKRs can take up a lot of time that would otherwise be used on core business activities.

Using the right tools

Businesses, small and large, also have varying levels of digital adoption across different departments. Manually inputting OKRs across one software used by the sales department may not be replicable, say, in the R&D departments, in addition to being time-consuming.

These can be addressed with OKR tools such as Profit.co that provide a dashboard overview to employees, middle management and C-suites while simultaneously integrating with software used by different departments.

A holistic OKR software, Profit provides companies a hierarchical view of how OKRs are aligned, as well as allowing businesses to set and manage objectives at a company, department, team and personal level.

Cognisant that businesses today are spoilt for choice in terms of cloud management apps, Profit seamlessly integrates with the Gmail add-ons, Office 365, Slack, Jira, Zapier, BambooHR, Azure Active Directory, and Google Marketplace.

An all-inclusive results management platform, Profit helps businesses manage OKRs (create and monitor OKRs), manage tasks (tracking individual and team tasks), engage employees (employee comments and rewards) and manage performance (real-time reviews and feedback). By integrating all four elements into one software, companies can reduce hassle related to rationalising spreadsheets with different input sources.

As working from home becomes our status quo, centralising all these tasks and processes in a single app keeps the entire company focused on goals communicated clearly through any upheavals in the supply chain or business processes.

Profit has helped clients manage OKRs regardless of industry or geography, ranging from positioning solutions provider Optron, supply chain player Gaea, data analytics business IntellectFaces, to vacation rental company Traum-Ferienwohnungen.

The Profit.co way

Profit is an Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) software integrated with task and performance management directed toward 360-degree organisation governance for accelerated growth while maintaining the best work culture.

For more information about them, visit their official website here.

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We all have been hit by unexpected situations and challenging times. It’s of paramount importance that our organizational goals are still met and risks are mitigated strategically. We have invited global leaders from Europe, The Middle East, APAC and America to share their experience and mentoring on how organizations can execute their strategies and transform their business digitally.

Register to our webinar here to learn more.

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