How to Align Your Hybrid Workforce with OKRs

Ever since the pandemic changed the way we work, remote flexibility has had a positive impact on employee experience, productivity, and engagement. Organizations that offer the freedom to work from home are much more likely to benefit from the new normal.

Now, as organizations figure out how to balance remote work with returning to the office, they’re seeing that implementing a hybrid work model is a challenging undertaking — especially when it comes to alignment. 

Hybrid work presents major challenges to alignment by changing familiar methods of communication, collaboration, and visibility. The resulting misalignment leads to uncoordinated efforts and wasted resources. 

Further, when employees are unsure of the company’s reasoning, goals, or strategy, they may disconnect from the purpose of their role, resulting in a loss of focus, engagement, and motivation.

Alignment is critical for any organization at any stage. As your company builds a hybrid work model, it's necessary to get ahead of these challenges.

Alignment helps the entire organization move toward its vision. When teams are rowing in the same direction, more of the right things get achieved in a short time. Communication is especially important in a dynamic business environment, where high-level priorities may shift.

Connection is necessary to build, communicate, and achieve shared goals and strategy within the organization. It's also highly sought after. 80% of employees want to work at an organization where they feel connected to the purpose and the people. When an employee feels connected to their work, they're more likely to feel engaged, help others, and stick around.

If your hybrid company is looking for a long-term solution to build alignment, there’s a framework you can use: OKRs (objectives and key results).

The OKR methodology addresses the alignment challenges presented by hybrid work, helping teams connect, as well as identify, agree upon, and rally around work that supports the company’s mission and vision. 

Objectives are qualitative and aspirational in nature while key results are ideally measurable and verifiable to ascertain whether the objective has been achieved. These components sync up priorities across the company while leaving room for innovation and creativity. 

OKRs are an inherently collaborative methodology in which teammates agree upon and reach goals through identifiable, measurable results. With everyone able to understand how what they do makes a difference to the organization’s well-being, they help create an individual and collective sense of purpose. 

When everyone can identify colleagues with related or shared objectives, cross-functional collaboration becomes simpler. This clarity holds teams accountable, and silos can be broken, regardless of where people are based.

OKRs’ emphasis on alignment with business goals leads to better decision-making and helps create stronger, more engaged leaders.

During the OKR implementation process, it’s necessary to ensure that alignment is built correctly from the beginning and sustained over time. Here are five tips that can help you carry the process forward successfully.

1. Empower autonomy

When building OKRs, empower employees to keep track of goals and iterate, keeping things adaptable while supporting the overarching business direction. This enables the continuous development of new leaders who take ownership of the company mission when strategizing toward goals.

2. Communicate with employees at all stages

Leaders need to practice communication, transparency, and visibility of goals, priorities, and strategy on a consistent basis so teams don’t get pulled off course. When leaders model this, the rest of the organization can pick up similar habits — clarity from leaders sets the stage for clarity throughout the entire company. Some organizational shifts may be in progress, but even uncertainty needs to be conveyed to the organization at large. 

3. Have the goal conversation first

OKRs work best when teams have an agreed-upon definition of impact. When setting objectives, sit down with your team or manager and ask them, “What are the three most important things for us to accomplish in the next three months?” Then, ask them why it’s important.

By asking why, leaders prompt their teams to share meaningful details about why they are trying to accomplish specific objectives. If your team collectively understands the “why” on a deeper level, you're likely to end up with better objectives, and you'll gain greater commitment.  

4. Check in regularly

With good objectives and measurable key results, remote workers can define their daily tasks with autonomy, while allowing managers to check in on progress regularly and offer any help or guidance. 

Encourage teams to provide confidence scores and updates to their OKRs while having transparent conversations about how progress is going. It’s okay to pivot gracefully when there are obstacles to achieving objectives. OKRs are not about perfection, but about learning from mistakes and making improvements.

5. Find the right technology solution

The right technology solution can enable an immediate visual understanding of the state of company alignment. OKRs capture organizational health and goal progress in real-time. 

In the modern business environment, the right strategy execution software will help you adapt fast enough to grow in varying conditions. 

Quantive's platform was designed to optimize alignment, provide an overview of company health, and give teams space to collaborate.

With Quantive's alignment view, employees can view any team’s objectives, key results, and progress. This enables informed decisions, encourages collaboration, and provides transparency regarding major updates and shifts.

Whiteboards is where teams and individuals can draft OKRs that align with top-level objectives. This unconstrained, safe space to collaborate allows teams to visually transform unstructured ideas into powerful strategies, reducing friction from creation to execution.

Quantive also enables you to make better decisions with integrated dashboards. Our Insightboards present complete, accurate, real-time data about your company’s health. This makes it easier to discover what’s not working and adapt quickly.

Quantive is your bridge between strategy and execution. Founded on the objectives and key results (OKR) methodology, our Strategy Execution Platform is where businesses plan successful strategy, focus and align teams to it, and stay on the leading edge of progress.

As your company looks to achieve the best possible results, you need a modern approach to run your business and change your business. The Modern Operating Model brings strategy, teams, and data together to help make decisions faster, optimize operations, and drive better business outcomes.

Whether you’re a large enterprise facing competitive disruption or a small business leading the innovative charge, Quantive helps gets you where you want to go.

Ready to achieve the best possible? Start using Quantive for free.