Beginning Your OKR Journey with Viva Goals

As you’re working through the OKR process and they see that OKRs will give them more focus and a clearer view of how their efforts help to drive the business forward, people start to see the benefits. For some people it's about an increased opportunity for visibility and recognition with the company while others derive more value from a better understanding of how they help make the company a success.

Also, the fact they can be used to help prevent people being given work that’s outside their area can be really attractive – being able to look at the task and see if it lines up to the OKRs is a powerful tool. You need to have an environment where people are empowered to say “This doesn’t align to my OKRs – is there someone else who is better suited to this?” to get the full benefit as well.

The main benefit for me as a leader is the visualization of the whole vision and the connection from every personal KPI to these goals. That helps our people in the organization to understand why this is necessary to do, even if it’s not clear in the first place. Due to the helping mentality in our organization and the transparency of team and company KPIs / objectives, we had multiple situations where people working on completely different topics are very supportive because they have some additional experience in these topics – something like technical support.

By not only recognizing this by the leaders but also talking about these positive experiences, it helps the user to motivate working together – also for “other” objectives. 

For me, you have to make sure they understand the purpose behind them and how it can benefit not just the organisation but them as an individual too. If they see it as just another thing to do or perhaps feel that it’s micro-managing, you’re off to a bad start! Equally, you need to show how they differ from KPIs and how OKRs give you the “why” behind what you’re doing. 

For most individuals, they prefer to spend their time doing things and achieving results rather than talking about achieving results. Explaining the concept of OKRs and focusing on alignment and reducing confusion/uncertainty is a good starting point, and then working with each member to create bespoke Key Results for them. 

I try to show people that OKRs weave into existing business processes and will make reviews and updates more efficient and effective in the long-term. Yes there's a learning curve for sure but, if people are bought in, it can be a great journey to take together. 

Once I've introduced them to the concept, I always ask people to create their own OKRs before we talk again. This helps them become more familiar with the process and, ultimately, more invested in the outcomes.

Especially as a leader, you often have some issues to translate the ideas and vision to every individual in your organization. Sure, you can explain it, draw some pictures but if not, everyone is directly involved, there is a lag of understanding how an individual can help the company to achieve these visions. By giving every person a connection to the company vision by visualizing the path helps them to engage more. At the same time, we’ve realized that we need to choose the period for the goals very carefully. If it’s a long-time goal with no specific requirement to make some check-ins, it’s not working. Within our company we use a 3-month period to avoid issues like this. We also use check-in requirements to make at least once per month.

Some users also use the integration of Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Planner with Viva Goals to make it easier to ensure the regular check-ins. So, this is not an additional step / task to complete, it’s an integrated part of the daily work.

That's a really good question! The individual OKRs of each team member should be focused on their role and strengths within the team and then, when taken together, those individual markers should collectively achieve the team goals.

In a perfect world, it should be the case that each individual does what they know they need to do and that hits their individual goals. If every individual does that, then the team goals should be achieved too. That won't always be the case, certainly not at first as there's a period of alignment where all parties are still working out exactly what is possible, how things can be achieved etc. but, over time, they should line up.

I would also point out that many Key Results and their initiatives are supposed to be stretch targets...so you don't necessarily want people hitting 100% each time. Setting them as stretch targets allows for personal growth, learning, and fulfilment while also driving success at a team, and thus organisational, level.

It was actually when I first saw about Viva Goals. Seeing that MS had a product focused on this area prompted me to start researching OKRs and I quickly found them to be a useful, strong framework for businesses.

Keeping everyone aligned across an organisation is key and OKRs stood out to me as a great way to do that. I've been part of various different efforts to do this over the years and OKRs struck me as a great solution. The ability to connect the overall company objectives through to team and even individual goals is really powerful - especially in remote and hybrid organisations.

Hi LizPierce, That is a great question! I was really conscious that I didn't want people to think it was ANOTHER thing they had to do for no clear reason and maybe something that would become a tick box exercise.

I focused on the why - I wanted to make sure everyone was bought into the concept from the beginning so I gave some training sessions on what OKRs are first of all and people started to see the links between OKRs and what we were already doing.

That made it feel like a natural progression so rather than an additional thing, it was simply a more refined, more purposeful version of an existing process and idea.