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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 Practice...
- 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.
brianabrady
Microsoft
MicrosoftThanks, 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.
