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Viva Goals Office Hours: OKR Alignment Best Practices Q&A
Hey folks,
Join us on this thread tomorrow, April 26th from 9:00 am - 9:30 am PST as WendyPatFong
answers your questions from our Viva Goals Office Hours session: OKR Alignment Best Practices. If you haven't registered for the Office Hours session yet, you can do that here.
See you all tomorrow! 
- Hi Julie,
I like this question a lot - you're correct. Loose alignment allows for more flexibility, innovation (it is pushing teams to think about the best "how"), and also empowerment from a bottom up perspective. The biggest caveat that I see with loose alignment is ensuring that there is no "white space". Because you are encouraging teams to align from bottom up on how they want to contribute to the higher level outcome, it is important to then take a step back and ensure that there is alignment from a cross-functional area and that you have all the right pieces of the puzzle in place. For example, if you are trying to increase your adoption rate of a product and one priority is to revamp your technology, when you are doing loose alignment, you will need to make sure that the IT team know that they need to prioritize the revamping of the technology. Often all the other teams will only focus on their roles to achieve the adoption rate, but there is also the danger of being too siloed, and not looking at the dependencies that need to happen.
8 Replies
- Kim_Burt
Microsoft
Happy to be here to engage with this awesome community and answer any question on Viva Goals OKRs adoption, value and how-to's! Thanks for the great session WendyPatFong! I really appreciated how you explained different ways to approach alignment. Are there advantages to staying with loose alignment? Is the trade-off increased flexibility but possibly less clarity across the organization? Curious about your thoughts here.
- WendyPatFongHi Julie,
I like this question a lot - you're correct. Loose alignment allows for more flexibility, innovation (it is pushing teams to think about the best "how"), and also empowerment from a bottom up perspective. The biggest caveat that I see with loose alignment is ensuring that there is no "white space". Because you are encouraging teams to align from bottom up on how they want to contribute to the higher level outcome, it is important to then take a step back and ensure that there is alignment from a cross-functional area and that you have all the right pieces of the puzzle in place. For example, if you are trying to increase your adoption rate of a product and one priority is to revamp your technology, when you are doing loose alignment, you will need to make sure that the IT team know that they need to prioritize the revamping of the technology. Often all the other teams will only focus on their roles to achieve the adoption rate, but there is also the danger of being too siloed, and not looking at the dependencies that need to happen.
brianabradyThanks, Brittany for the session today.
I have a quick follow-up question for WendyPatFong , are there any scenarios where I could align an objective to another objective?- Kim_BurtThanks for asking Briana! In the Viva Goals app, at an objective level, we have the ability to add 1. a child objective, 2. a key result or 3. a project currently. Does that answer your question? Feel free to let me know, thanks! Also see below post from Wendy on objective alignment for more info.
- WendyPatFongHi Briana,
Great question! I have seen objective align to objective in the following scenarios:
- Brand new to OKR; If you are new to OKR, alignment O to O is a great way to start developing the alignment muscle. It allows people to start thinking on a higher level, how do we all move towards the same direction
- For similar OKRs at different level; I have seen this example quite a bit where you might have an OKR such as "Improve our employee experience to provide a great place to work" with key results around employee satisfaction, retention etc. Often the same objective will be cascaded to the different teams with their own type of KRs. For example, a manager might have the same objective on the team level and focus on specific areas of improvement such as work life balance. In this situation, it makes more sense for the manager to align the team O to the company O.
- For Objectives that are not directly contributing to one specific KR; while this sound obvious, I have seen companies encourage O to O for objectives that are brand new. For example, if a team is coming up with a brand new idea that they want to test (more like a hypothesis or incubation), it might make more sense to align to the O instead to a specific KR as it is more in a testing/incubation phase. If we do get good outcomes out of the objective, it can later on be re-iterated to then be aligned to be a specific KR.
- Thanks for the interesting session earlier, Wendy. On OKR alignment - and whether OKRs are tightly or loosely aligned - what research and data do you have on the relative performance / success of organisations using tight-aligned OKRs vs loose-aligned OKRs?
- WendyPatFongHi Greg,
This is a great question - I do not know of specific research done around comparing loose versus tight alignment. From my own experience, I see many companies will naturally transition from tight to loose as they become more comfortable with OKRs. It has to do with maturity but also the time it takes for alignment. Tight alignment drags longer because you have to wait for the higher level OKRs to be clearly defined instead of loose alignment, you have the Key Result above and you are spending more time brainstorming and collaborating with your own team.
I will definitely start looking at the longevity and adoption rate of organizations using the 2 different alignment because I am curious now!
