Ending the OKR Cycle

Ending the OKR Cycle

At the start of the cycle, we set a handful of goals and tacked on measurable markers for success. Now we’re calling time.

Did we cross our finish line? If we did, what helped us make it?

And if we didn’t, what caused us to fall short? And what would we do differently next time?

Grading and reflecting is the moment we’ve been building toward throughout the cycle.

We’re about to learn not just how to grade our OKRs, but also how to reflect on them to help us set better goals for the next cycle.

Grade OKRs with scores

Grading is an unbiased activity. For every Key Result, we mark how far we got. It will be very clear if we met or exceeded our Key Result – or if we didn’t.

Grading should be quick and efficient. If you’ve been tracking your Key Results throughout the cycle, you’ll have a good read on what those scores will be. There not going to be many surprises.

To get an overall score for the OKR, take the average of its Key Results. Each one counts equally toward the OKR score.

Example of OKR Grading

Here’s an example: Let’s say your aspirational Objective is to increase a car’s fuel economy.

KR1: Reduce the car’s weight by 10 percent. Amazingly, our team reduced its weight by 9 percent, so we got a score of 0.9.

KR2: Reduce drag by 12 percent. We cut it by 6 percent, for a score of 0.5.

KR3: Source more fuel-efficient tires. Unfortunately, we haven’t closed the deal yet, but we’re about halfway through the process and it should come together soon. So we get a score of 0.5.

Remember, Key Results should be written so the score is easy to measure and any team member should be able to verify the score, with no debate. There might be debate over why the team wound up with a given score. But that happens later, in the reflection stage.

To score our overall OKR, we take the average of the three KR scores: In this case = 0.63.

Understanding OKR scores

In grading Aspirational OKRs, Google considers a range of 0.7 to 1.0 as green. It means we were very close to delivering fully. Or we delivered. So in our example, we didn’t make green.

OKRs with a grade from 0.4 to 0.6 are yellow. We made progress but fell short of completion. That’s where our example OKR falls. And if the grade lands between zero and 0.3, that’s red. We failed to make significant progress.

Our yellow score on this OKR tells us we made progress toward our goal, but not as much as we’d hoped.

Grading is that quick and simple.

Grading committed vs. aspirational OKRs

Across the board, your Committed OKRs should hit a score of 1.0, or 100 percent. There’s no middle ground for these goals; they’re either green or red.

Aspirational goals are less binary. Some will miss the mark completely, say 10%. Others may hover around 50%. You might get a green one at 80%, and every once in while you’ll even overachieve above 100%.

To build goal-setting muscle, it’s important to look at the average score across all your Aspirational OKRs. Don’t weigh its success or failure based on a single Aspirational OKR.

If you’re consistently scoring below 30% across all your aspirational goals, it’s a sign that you’re setting goals that are too ambitious for your current capacity.

On the other hand, if you’re consistently scoring 100% on all your Aspirational OKRs – that’s sandbagging. That when you pretend a goal is harder to achieve than it really is.

Your average score across all your Aspirational OKRs measures your organization’s appetite for stretch. Google knows if its average is 70%, their teams are making bold enough OKRs. Your organization might set a different bar – just be sure to communicate it clearly across the organization.

Pairing grading with self-assessment

On their own, grades don’t mean all that much. That’s why we always pair grading with self-assessment and reflection.

Self-assessment adds subjective judgment to your objective scores. Let’s look at one example:

Say you work on a PR team, and one of your quarterly Key Results was to generate new leads by landing three national news placements.

The team landed only two, for an initial grade of 0.67, or 67 percent. But one of them was a front-page mention in The Wall Street Journal. And that led directly to signing two big clients.

During self-assessment, it would be appropriate to bump your score to 90 percent for the KR. In terms of impact, you knocked it out of the park!

Or perhaps your team landed only two placements in smaller publications because you were too late getting press releases out. In your self-assessment, you might lower your score to 30 percent to account for the failure in the process.

Reflecting and improving for the next cycle

After self-assessment is completed, it’s time for my favorite part of the process: reflection. Reflecting helps us understand what happened and figure out how to improve things the next cycle.

Let’s go back to our PR example. With discussion, the team realizes that their main bottleneck was inside their internal process around approvals. With even more digging, they discover that they could speed up the process by holding a combined review across the company and reduce approval time by one week.

With reflection, they learned something of significant value to the team, not just for that particular OKR.

Reflection is a learning exercise. Here are some questions to help your team perform better:

• Did we accomplish all of our Objectives?
• If we didn’t, what obstacles did we face?
• If we could rewrite a goal that we achieved in full, what would we change?
• What have we learned that might change our approach in the next OKR cycle?

In general, OKR reflections are about asking the team: “How can we get better?”

You’ll find the most value in collective reflections, where you’re drawing conclusions together. Since people will have differing opinions about why you landed where you did, teamwork is especially important in this subjective phase of the work.

Use grading, self-assessment, and reflections to surface and resolve tensions in service of the next cycle. By taking time at the end of one cycle to grade and reflect, we set our team up for greater success in the next one.