OKRs are being used to define and implement company-wide goals trickling down from team-wide objectives to individual ones. This allows businesses to have a clear sight of what to achieve and remain aligned toward it.
However, despite being ambitious, it can get challenging to reach the key results. Nevertheless, working as a team towards the same set of goals requires slaying dragons together and supporting one another - and this inevitably needs to be done through OKR periodic check-ins.
Performing periodic OKR check-ins is crucial as they:
● Shift focus to actions that will help in achieving company-wide goals.
● Identify roadblocks until it’s late
● Give a bird’s-eye perspective of the current business goals and environment.
● Promote learning across the organization.
● Calibrate expectations.
Therefore, it is important to learn and understand how to run period OKR check-ins to facilitate the progress of the framework.
5 Ways to Conduct Weekly OKR Check-ins
1. Set up a meeting agenda
The best way to run an OKR check-in is by setting up and following a robust meeting agenda (which sadly does not include TGIF plans). Setting up an agenda ensures the check-in meeting runs smoothly from the beginning to the end.
Besides that, it also helps in dedicating time to ascertain periodic check-ins challenges or areas of improvement in the OKR.
Moreover, employees come prepared when there’s a meeting agenda set beforehand. Yes, there would be no more of an i-am-falling-from-the-sky look 🪂 when you ask your team member for a report This allows everyone to focus on crucial OKR aspects like priority tasks, new learning, and progress to date.
2. Evaluate the framework
Evaluating the OKR framework where the current status of the team is tallied against what it was in the previous week can determine which objectives have been achieved and which ones are left.
This way you can determine who is drinking from the fountain of knowledge and who is just gargling.
The framework can be evaluated with the help of a rating system where the progress against the objectives is measured on a standardized scale. This rating will showcase the progress that has been already made toward specific OKR goals.
Therefore, the OKR leaders can quantitatively document the outcomes. Besides that, leaders can also consider the current progress rate to predict the team’s future achievements (welcome to the real world. It sucks, but you’ll love it).
3. Work as a team
There's no alternative to working as a team (Except the time of Robots Uprising 🤖 ) as it is essential for reporting the progress and the impediments that are surfacing.
A thorough documentation process is synonymous with making your team members wear blinkers. Now, they will solely focus on areas that need the most work at the moment.
Moreover, when employees work as a team, they can point out new objectives that can be chased to further upscale their achievements. Following such a method allows everyone to visualize their goal statuses during their weekly check-ins.
4. Utilize an OKR tracking tool
Without tracking everyone’s progress properly, one cannot track the success of their OKRs or any common goal for that matter. By implementing an OKR tracking tool in the workplace, leaders are simply a click away from checking whether Humpty Dumpty is climbing or falling down the wall.
In addition to that, these tools can also be used for addressing at-risk objectives during the weekly check-in meetings.
OKR tracking tools can also be used for linking the objectives to the weekly OKR meetings. This makes reviewing progress, resolving challenges, and ensuring everything are on track.
5. Assign action plans
Conducting a weekly OKR check-in is not the end of it. For the check-in to be worthwhile, leaders should assign action plans to the individual employees or teams as a whole. This action plan points to the next steps that everyone can take toward achieving their respective goals.
Action items need to be specific, identify the tasks as a priority, have a key stakeholder, and be completed within a specified timeline.
Now,*Super hero Landing* 🦸♂️
Wrky.ai || Manage your OKRs smoothly
Wrky.ai is built for startups between 30-500 people teams to run the smooth OKRs setting, tracking & Check-ins. If you're a team highly focused on your "North Star", it's high time you consider wrky in your OKR journey, how about a trail first!!
