Here’s all you need to know about driving OKRs with KPIs
Are OKRs better than KPIs is like asking the question:
‘Chips or Salsa?’ Or a more appropriate toss up in business, ‘Growth or Profits?’
Most CEOs worldwide would go hands down on Profitable Growth to run a sustained business in the long run! Indeed!
It takes two to tango, and the dance between OKRs and KPIs can make a great business symphony.
Fitbots has helped 5000+ teams worldwide on set 50000+ high quality OKRs on our software, tracking and managing them with sharp insights. We now are proud to unveil KPI or Metric Boards, to track and manage other ‘Business as usual metrics’ that they keep an eye on, but may not have been part of OKRs in the past.
Every organization has a plethora of metrics to measure & track its business performance. These are referred to as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), a set of values used to measure the performance of a company, project, or person.
They are usually quantitative, but may also be qualitative in nature. KPIs call out measures at a certain point in time. For instance, there are KPIs that can be tracked and monitored daily, weekly, monthly, and sometimes even annually. Not all KPIs contribute to the growth of the organization but may be important to measure.
OKRs on the other hand are deeply coupled with the Strategy of the organization. OKRs are more often than not, referred to as a strategy execution framework. They call out which metrics are to be cherry-picked to drive growth. In other words, not all KPIs make it a part of OKRs, only the ones which supercharge growth!
There are two kinds of KPIs: Quantitative Facts and Qualitative Conformance to a Standard.
Quantitative facts are objective numeric values measured against a standard. These numbers tell you how your company does compare to other companies, how your product compares to other products or individually, and how your measures are doing. They pretty much tell a story at a point in time.
Qualitative represents non-numeric conformance to a standard, or interpretation of personal feelings, tastes, opinions, or experiences. A good example would be an employee satisfaction survey that asks employees to rate their experience from ‘Not Satisfied to Extremely Satisfied’ This is a qualitative measurement because it doesn't have any numbers associated with it; the employee's answers are the only factor considered when evaluating their experience at the company.
Importantly, KPIs can be measured at multiple levels:
Corporate level: Company KPIs such as revenue, margins, market share, and profits are all examples of metrics that a corporation measures to inform its decision-making process.
Departmental level: Departmental KPIs, such as sales and marketing targets, are also useful for monitoring how departments are performing against their goals. For instance, number of emails sent and delivered, website bounce rates, campaign performance, Click Through Rates ( CTRs) are all KPIs measured by Sales and Marketing teams.
Team level: Team KPIs enable you to see how your teams are doing and how they compare to other teams within the company. Sending Weekly compliance reports, and filing taxes on time.
Individual level: Individual KPIs allows you to monitor an employee's performance relative to their standard of excellence. For instance, the number of calls made per day per sales rep, number of users spoken to, number of blogs published per content marketeer, or number of employees spoken to in a week, etc.
At Fitbots we have taken all of this into account providing the ability to create your boards. A user can organize KPIs as Teams or Departments. By getting into a specific board, one would see all KPIs that are being measured, and track progress month on month or week on week.
Ref: KPIs organized by teams, Department, and Individuals
Together OKRs and KPIs form a compelling tool for decision-making and actions.
OKRs are linked to strategy and are cherry-picked to propel an organization forward, while KPIs are the business-as-usual metrics, which tell companies the story of how they have performed. Together OKRs and KPIs form a compelling tool for decision-making and actions.
OKR are written as teams rather than individuals. They are aligned to the Mission, vision, and strategy, so that everyone in the organization knows exactly what success looks like for them—and therefore what success looks like for the organization as a whole.
Not all KPIs make it into OKRs, however many organizations like to keep an eye on KPIs as they call out business performance clearly. For instance, if your
Objective is ‘ Grow existing customers through land and expand to accelerate growth
KR 1: Increase renewals from 40% to 85%
KPIs could measure many other metrics such as Customer satisfaction, product usage each week/ month, number of touchpoints per customer, and more. Not all these KPIs need to be part of your OKRs but support the achievement of your OKRs.
It's no secret that templates can be a POWERFUL tool for accelerating the adoption of new concepts, but many people don't realize how it simply works.
KPI/ OKR template can be used as an outline, guidepost, or framework for you to use when you are choosing what's best for your organization. We have analyzed 100,000+ records over time and are constantly consolidating and recommending new templates to our end users.
We believe that information should be confidential or open, as there are times you would need a bit of both.
Our goal is to provide you with access to all of your KPI / metric boards based on access controls configured by you. We understand that not all of our users can have similar access across the board.
The metrics in private boards are by default private metrics and are sharable in private boards.
Metrics in public boards may be used across the application.
In Fitbots we let you create and configure boards.
Once KPIs are tracked month on month or week on week, you could view trends using our simple and easy to use graphs, which tell a ton on the health of the business or department or team or individual!
“Words inspire, but only action creates change.”
For each KPI, a user can set a series of actions to achieve the KPI. These actions can be assigned to owners, have due dates pinned against them, and notifications configured to never lose sight.
If you would like to be part of our Beta List of users, you could use this link to Apply. This is an Invite Only Beta, and we will get back to you in 24 hours of your application.
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