Amazon, Google, Spotify, GoPro, Slack, Microsoft. What do they all have in common?
They are all incredibly successful — and they utilize OKRs to help craft their mission, engage their employees, and highlight the top priorities of the company.
The Objectives and Key Results system has been proven to be an excellent framework to help companies reach their goals. But to use it to its fullest potential, a great visual tool that you should consider adding to your company is an OKR dashboard.
This will help create a visual aspect to your OKR framework which can help it work more effectively for you and your employees. In this article, we'll tell you what you need to know about how to create an OKR dashboard to track your company's progress.
What is an "OKR?"
The OKR framework is a goal-setting system that helps organizations, teams, and individual employees monitor their progress towards a collective goal.
This system is so effective because it allows users to visualize real-time progress. This helps push employees to do their best by owning their goals on their own rather than a supervisor micro-managing them.
OKRs are also useful to quickly align the goals of different teams as well as quickly spot places that are lagging on certain goals. Organizations can quickly correct what they need to do without making major changes.
OKR software can help businesses do this by providing comprehensive data and insights in real-time.
What is an OKR dashboard?
An OKR dashboard displays the data collected for your OKRs and collates them. Here, both management and employees can review progress on goals company-wide.
As employees update data according to their schedules, the information and visuals on the dashboard will change in real-time.
For teams and individuals to make impactful outcomes toward their company's goals, there are several factors that must happen:
- The organization's objectives and values must pervade every level
- There should be an effective system to break down goals
- There should be a system to quickly communicate goals
- Employees must identify mistakes and weak links
- Supervisors must track progress toward goals
- Mistakes and weak links must be identified
- Progress needs to be measured and documented visually
- A dedicated group must collect and analyze the data
However, manually analyzing and communicating all of this data can be slow and inefficient.
An OKR dashboard can help businesses incorporate and align all of these aspects in an efficient and accessible manner. Leaders and employees can then visualize everything from the ground up.
An OKR dashboard will typically have the following data:
- Progress on objectives
- Progress on team goals
- Progress on individual goals
- Culture and values
- Feedback
But to be helpful, it must be set up correctly.
How to effectively monitor OKRs in a dashboard
Different organizations will have different styles of OKR dashboards that will fit their needs best, but here is a general outline of how to get started building your OKR dashboard.
1. Set Objectives and Key Results
The first step is to create quality objectives. This will act as a vision statement for your OKR dashboard. These should be able to be achieved through specific, measurable goals — or your key results.
For example, a company wants to sell $20m in bookings. The key results will be to acquire 2,0000 deals worth $20m by a certain date and to generate 60,000 qualified leads.
2. Allot weightage for Key Results
For every key result, you should be able to track overall progress out of a total of 100%. This can be determined by separating key results based on importance.
3. Break Key Results into smaller goals
Your key results need to be broken down further into action items that your employees can work on to progress towards the goal. Your OKR dashboard can display these goals and responsibilities.
To follow our earlier example, a smaller goal could be for a sales rep to make 30 calls a day and hit a certain sales target a week.
4. Communicate Key Results and targets with the organization
Make sure that everything decided upon in the previous steps is clearly communicated throughout the entire organization. Having full transparency can help individuals take responsibility for their goals.
5. Continually enter progress and track eesults
Every week, have employees input their progress. It should automatically reflect on your dashboard as a percentage towards each individual goal out of 100%.
Your OKR dashboard can also display ratings and performance of individual employees and their contribution toward company-wide goals. This can give leaders a comprehensive view of performance across all levels.
6. Review and realign
The great advantage of being able to track real-time progress is the ability to catch gaps in performance and roadblocks that can hinder progress towards goals. These can help leaders course-correct their employees towards their goals.
Benefits of using an OKR dashboard
An OKR dashboard brings several benefits to an organization. These include:
- Automating the monumental task of measuring progress can save a significant amount of time and resources
- Visualizing progress can help employees focus on what is most important and what can be discarded, raising efficiency
- Showing team goals can help individuals prioritize what's most important
- Seeing errors and shortcomings can help teams course-correct for a better results
- It motivates and pushes employees to do better and work more efficiently
- Visualizing across the entire company helps promote transparency in the organization
- Linking progress and performance can help employees build camaraderie among team members to reach goals
- Employees that work well can be awarded and recognized for their work
Effectively using an OKR dashboard can help unify your company and set it on the right path towards its goals.
Lead your team more efficiently with a proper OKR framework
Utilizing an OKR framework for your business can help align your employees' objectives, no matter how large your organization is. It has been proven time and time again as one of the most effective ways at organizing goals by some of the biggest companies in the world.
If you're looking for a single management software platform that can give you everything you need for employee performance and engagement, get a free demo of our software today!
