The OKR Cycle

The OKR Cycle

For OKRs to work well, everyone’s got to commit to the calendar.

What do we mean by “committing to the calendar?” We mean that OKRs have an internal rhythm. They come and go in regular cycles. And if you don’t find your organization’s optimal OKR rhythm, it’s harder to make them work.

Here are the beats of an OKR cycle:

• Crafting: This is when creating the next cycle’s OKRs begins.
• Sharing: This is when leadership shares its top-level OKRs, kicking off cascades and ladders.
• Locking: This is when the cycle’s OKRs are finalized after the cascades and ladders end.
• Tracking: It’s an ongoing process to measure progress against OKRs at regular team meetings and check-ins.
• Grading and reflecting: This is when you score the cycle’s OKRs and share what you’ve learned.

That’s a complete OKR cycle.

Cascading and laddering every 90 days might sound like a lot of work. But introducing new OKRs at least a couple of times a year is a good idea. When used well, OKRs help your teams learn what’s working and what’s not. Then you can either double down on your approach or change it.

That’s why you want to write OKRs as you go – at the start of each new cycle, not ahead of time. Once you’ve set a year-long goal, it can be tempting to break it into quarters: Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 – but we’d advise you not to – you’ll learn so much throughout the cycle.

Grading, setting, and locking your OKRs shouldn’t be a long and heavy process. Even at Google, with over 100,000 employees, the entire process: grading the last cycle’s OKRs, cascading, laddering, and locking – takes a total of three weeks.

Transitioning from one OKR cycle to the next

Here’s a rough guideline for how that works:

• Grading and reflecting, starting from bottom-up, should take about a week.
• Crafting new top-level OKRs should take a matter of days.
• Once the OKRs have been shared with the organization, the cascade and ladder will take another week.
• Then there’s one more week to lock and work out any alignment issues that may have popped up.

If you’re a small organization, you may not need the whole three weeks to transition from one cycle to the next. But no matter the size of your organization, three weeks should be the maximum time to go from one cycle to the next. That’s right, three weeks to grade and reflect, to craft, to cascade and ladder, and lock your OKRs in.

Tracking OKRs

As soon as you’ve settled on a start date for setting your OKRs, one of the easiest things to do to make OKRs work is to get the important dates for each cycle on people’s calendars. Yes, the one that’s in Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar.

People’s calendars determine how most of our days and weeks are organized. They’re already a drumbeat for your whole organization. So make appointments for your OKRs, too.

On that first day, schedule the dates for each beat of your OKR cycle:

• When will goals be locked?
• When is the first tracking meeting?
• How often will you check in on progress?
• When does grading begin?

Send out calendar invites with reminders so the OKRs cycle is almost unavoidable. Include links to the OKRs in the invite to make them just a click away.

By putting these important dates on the calendar, you’ll help keep the OKR process top-of-mind.