You know how important retaining employees is when your new business is starting to move up and some senior leader has found a new job. It is even worse when they say, “I don’t like the culture here.”

You may have to wait days and months to get the new professional on board. The costs due to poor employee turnover can increase in the long term.

When you use OKRs to support business growth and a work culture that is highly aligned with the most important organizational goals, you enable the team to build an inspiring culture.

Let’s see how exactly the OKR methodology supports an employee-centered culture.

What do employees expect from the company?

A new employee may come in all pumped up to take his responsibilities to the next level, but it is common to see that energy fade out with time.

Unless some continuing motivation drives them, they may lose interest in their work.

Employees and people usually in life are driven majorly by a sense of purpose.

Let’s put these expectations in real terms here:

• A clearly defined vision or business goals to create alignment. High ethical standards.
• Fair compensation and treatment
• Business growth and profitability
• Work-life balance and flexibility at work
• Career-growth opportunities
• Comprehensive benefits and perks (health care, paid leaves, flexibility, bonuses, etc.)

Making employee experience better by using OKR methodology

There are quite a few aspects to building a great work culture. Employee happiness is a big one of them. It takes time to build a culture, and new businesses lack the appropriate guidance to do the former.

Using OKR methodology, you can fix or build an employee-centered culture. The main goal here is to give a sense of purpose to the team.

Better alignment with the company values

Can everyone at your organization link their work to the business values and goals?

Do the team members know what impact the business makes in society?

Ethical standards are a big deal for employees. About 68% of the workers consider ethical aspects at work to be very important. It’s one thing to paste a poster of the company vision on the office wall and another to align the employee’s day-to-day work with the business values and goals.

If your team lacks that alignment, OKRs are a good starting point to implement a high-level alignment between everyone at the company.

OKR management lets the team have individual objectives directly impacting the central business values and goals.

Employee engagement with collaboration and feedback

Any value-driven culture has pretty involved team members. The workers are inspired by the fact that they know their objectives pretty clearly, and it makes a difference in the business.

Everywhere around the world, some people are vocal about work-related opinions and suggestions, some are oppressed, and some don’t just speak up.

With the OKR framework, every team member is assigned public OKRs. They are accountable for them and must speak up in the meetings. To make the assigned outcomes happen, they must collaborate.

The active coordination with the team sparks pretty involved conversations and feedback. Apart from the team-level feedback, the managers promote open communication because, without that, they cannot figure out the mistakes they have made and move the progress bar.

Fair treatment and recognition with transparency

When every employee’s responsibility is publicly communicated, it creates a healthy work environment. New teams with a newly implemented OKR framework may struggle to maintain fairness, but with time, this leads to happier employees.

Employees get together in regular check-ins, and everyone looks at the overall progress and each KRs. The purpose of these review meetings is not to point out bad performers but the obstacles in the team’s and business’s positive growth.

Whatever the performance state, good or bad, is bare in front of the team, a short but warm appreciation goes a long way for the team. 

Other points that strengthen fair treatment are: Frequent appreciation, Peer recognition, shout-outs or recognition stories in company newsletters or blogs, etc.

Better work-life balance with greater accountability

Employees that understand their responsibilities are more likely to be accountable for their job. A chaotic way of working breeds stress, and workers may feel burned out if that goes on long enough.

OKRs, in a way, declutter an employee’s life. When their work life is sorted, they are happier in their time. This clarity at work can also boost productivity and allow employees to balance work and life well.

More growth opportunities for the employees

OKRs enable the team members to collaborate and develop innovative solutions to upcoming problems. KRs provides a clearly defined outcome that guides employees to use every possible resource to achieve it.

For example, an Inbound marketing manager adopts a new KR to increase Email leads by 20% in the next quarter. They start talking with the Outbound marketing executive to learn how to design effective emails or create a new course on Email Marketing.

The motivation to achieve positive outcomes for themselves and the company drives individual growth.

OKRs are for everyone at the company. The successful execution of OKRs demands team members to engage actively and find meaning in their work.

For effective OKR management, companies must use a specific software platform. A platform like JOP enables the team to manage OKRs efficiently without affecting their productivity.

Check out our website to learn more about JOP and book a free demo.