You spend a ton of time developing your annual strategy. Then more time is spent with creating your quarterly targets. Then you announce all of your goals and teams spend time developing their own goals. Everyone knows what they’re responsible for, but when you get to the end of the quarter, targets are missed or put off until the next quarter and your team is grumbling about not wanting to have a formal goal process any longer.
How do you avoid burning your team out by forcing them into a process that’s doomed to fail?
We’ve put together a set of suggestions to help your team be more engaged with your goal cycle and keep you more aligned as an organization.
1. Linking team goals to company goals keeps teams connected
There’s a parable of the bricklayer that has always resonated with goal tracking:
A man walked by three bricklayers and asked them what they were doing. The first bricklayer said with a sign “I’m laying bricks.” The second bricklayer stoically replied “I’m building a wall.” But the third bricklayer looked up to the sky and with wonder in their eyes said “I’m building a cathedral.”
Teams that understand not just what they’re doing, but why they’re doing it are more likely to be engaged with that work. And it’s not just hypothetical bricklayers, either– a Gallup Report found that employees who could connect their work to their organization’s top-level goals were 3.5x more likely to be engaged.
But it’s one thing to show the connection. Let’s give our hypothetical bricklayer more input– they’ve noticed that they don’t have enough bricks to lay, that this issue is going to cause a delay (at best) or an incomplete or shoddy cathedral (at worst). They tell their foreman, but nothing changes. On the next cathedral, will they be so quick to highlight problems, or will they lay their bricks and go home?
Ensuring that team members’ voices are heard is key to not only getting the most up-to-date information from those on the front lines, but also keeping them empowered to take ownership and solve problems themselves. According to Salesforce Research, “employees who feel their voice is heard are 4.6 times more likely to feel empowered to do their best work.”
2. Frequent updates shorten the time to solve problems
Some leaders fear that asking their teams for more updates will be burdensome and lead to disengagement. But they miss a key element when expressing this fear– it’s not the frequency of updates that causes teams to disengage, it’s finding the updates not useful.
See if you can spot what’s wrong with this weekly cycle:
- Monday: Teams write their updates for their goals independently
- Tuesday: Teams meet to discuss their updates. They go in a circle reading (verbatim, frequently) what they wrote. Their team members nod along waiting for their turn.
- Wednesday-Friday: They’ve moved on from their goals and are focused on their day-to-day tasks
We’ve created a cycle where there’s duplicate work and haven’t left time for solutioning or improving. Why should the team do their written updates if they’re just going to have to talk about them out loud the next day anyway?
Consider this subtle change:
- Monday: Teams write their updates by a certain time. By end-of-day, they read and comment on each other’s, celebrating wins, offering assistance, commiserating about a similar issue. All of this is asynchronous.
- Tuesday: The team meets to discuss any major blockers that were uncovered and/or ask for assistance. The meeting is focused on action items and next steps.
- Wednesday-Friday: The team has a plan for the rest of their week with fewer questions on how to proceed.
Creating a useful goal cycle and teams will give useful updates.
3. Use automations and AI to let your team focus
You want your team to engage with your goal strategy, not just your goal upkeep. When your team is spending the bulk of their time updating a spreadsheet with data that already exists in another place, they’re not giving you insights, they’re just doing busy work.
Your metrics only tell you what has already happened. If you want to understand what will happen next, you need updates from your team about things that only they can tell you. How likely are they to hit their targets, What work is scheduled, what blockers are they running into, what do they need to be successful? And if you want the best updates, you’ll want them to be able to focus only on giving you those details, not opening up multiple tabs to move a metric from dashboard A to dashboard B.
Tability lets you connect your data directly to your key results in order to save your team time and let them spend their mental energy on writing great updates (we even have a template they can follow here).
You can also leverage our AI to automatically generate check-ins, retrospectives and monthly reports based on the things your team has called out– the wins, potential risks, and next steps for all of your goals. All without spending hours reading and rewriting the updates your team already gave.
4. Bring in more teams to break down silos
Your team is connected to the top-level company goals. They’re writing good updates and shortening the time they need to get help or solutions. Everything is firing on all cylinders, but for some reason, you’re still running into roadblocks. What gives?
When our teams are siloed, we make it harder to communicate our needs to others. And when teams are waiting on updates (often solely on whether a project is completed or not), our zone of influence shrinks– it’s hard to get another team to want to offer assistance if it’s not clear how it will benefit them or the company at large.
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Similarly, if you’re asking for another team’s resources, you’ll need to know what is taking up their bandwidth. The better the understanding, the better the communication. Before a support team supports users on a product, the sales team has to sell it and the marketing team has to market it and the engineering team needs to build it and the product team needs to design it… Getting a better line of sight into every step along the way means knowing who is in the trenches and who is available for collaboration. And that better insight means a larger zone of influence.
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Because in the end, better collaboration is what’s best for business. In fact, more cross functional collaboration are more innovative– up to 51% more so, according to McKinsey.
5. Talk about your goals in public
Strategy, alignment, top-line goals… these aren’t typically left to chance. No, even with processes that give a lot of autonomy to teams, there’s still someone working behind the scenes to ensure that everything stays on track. But where a lot of organizations go awry is having only that one person truly understand how everything is going.
Bringing goals out of the tracking tool and talking about them is critical to OKR success. OKR Mentors’ 2023 leadership survey found that OKR overachievers typically had OKR champions on the executive team. Having an OKR champion on the executive team gives you another chance to show the importance of committing to the process– not only by having a leader within the organization showing their importance, but also by giving you a reason to include OKR updates within company all hands or organization-wide memos.
If you dedicate space in your organization for discussing your goals, your teams will be empowered to take the time to engage with the process. Ignoring your goals will lead to your teams doing the same.
6. Learn from your process
At the end of your first quarter doing formal goal tracking, you’ll know how your team performed on their goals that quarter. But if you want to see how your team is doing with goal setting and how they’re improving, you’ll need to collect more data. But how do you get an apples-to-apples comparison each quarter if your goals aren’t the same?
A good retrospective is going to track more than just the percentage completion of your key results. It also gives your team space to talk about the OKR process and what could make it run more smoothly next time. We recommend running a start-stop-continue exercise, and just as importantly, publishing and sharing your retrospectives with the rest of the organization.
As you publish more retrospectives from quarter to quarter, you’ll be able to review how your teams feel about the process and just how much they’re getting from it.
Rinse and repeat
One of the most important goals you can have is to do a little better next quarter. Goals allow you to have continuous improvements within your organization and empower your team to be more focused. With better alignment, you can be confident that your organization is moving in the right direction and not losing time doing duplicative or contradictory work. And even better, you can know that your team understands their part in the strategy and will see the improvement in their engagement with your goal process.
Of course, tools like Tability are built to help you build these processes and keep your team engaged. Interested in seeing Tability in action? Start a trial today!
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