Forum Discussion
Solved
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.
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.
WendyPatFong
Microsoft
MicrosoftHi 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.
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.