6 Benefits of OKRs

Quick Insight

Scan the bolded items in the bullets below to see why OKRs have become so popular.

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) have become popular because they provide many benefits to companies. Here’s a short list of some of these benefits:

  • Increased agility and innovation: It’s no wonder that OKRs have been embraced most in areas like Silicon Valley and by startups everywhere. It’s a lightweight process for planning and execution that emphasizes frequent cycles of updates to strategy and process. It balances the tensions between focused effort toward achieving goals with frequent assessments of progress and direction.
  • Clearly and easily communicates strategy: The connection between objectives and key results clearly explains what we want to accomplish and why we want to accomplish it. OKRs can lead to better strategies that are more clearly understood and embraced by everyone in the company. Your mission must be memorable to be motivational.
  • Prioritization and Focus: As part of OKR planning, you must identify the most important objectives and key results, making all else secondary.
  • Transparency: The transparency of OKRs leads to a host of benefits. These include trust, cooperation, collaboration, and engagement. Many companies that have implemented OKRs talk about improved cooperation and collaboration.
  • Accountability: The clarity of OKRs creates accountability. When people understand the company’s strategies and goals, they have context for company decisions. Leaders can point to the OKRs to explain the choices they make. Employees can point to OKRs when leaders make choices that don’t reflect company priorities.
  • Alignment: OKRs enhance clarity and accountability, which creates alignment. Further, the OKR cadence of setting OKRs, periodically reviewing progress towards OKRs, and scoring achievement of OKRs at the end of a period creates a framework for revisiting and discussing goals.

I wish you agility, clarity, focus, and alignment. I wish you well.


- Rob Stephens

Further Insight

CFO Perspective Resources

  • Video: OKR Objectives and Key Results - Objectives and Key Results, also known as OKRs, have become very popular for improving company performance. OKRs are an effective way to measure progress towards achieving your business goals. Good OKRs follow a simple set of rules to be most effective. I’ll explain the characteristics of good objectives and key results.
  • Course: Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) - What performance secret can you learn from Google, Intel, and Intuit? Objectives and Key Results, also known as OKRs, have become very popular for improving company performance. OKRs can improve focus, engagement, innovation, and performance. I'll walk you step-by-step through how to implement OKRs at your company.

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