Set Purposeful Business Objectives Using OKRs

Why set Business Objectives?

When you're running a business, there's often too much to do and not enough time to make it happen.

When your focus is on completing daily tasks, there is little time left to look at your business from a strategic perspective.

Instead, your attention will likely be centred on short-term goals and merely operating day-to-day.

However, taking a strategic approach and setting out clear and purposeful business objectives can be instrumental to a company’s long-term success.

Business Goals Vs. Business Objectives: Understand the Difference

Your business will already have goals you likely set as part of your company mission, but when focusing on the long-term goals, we can often get diverted or side-tracked along the way.

Not having measured and attainable indicators of success towards achieving business goals can lead to demotivation, miscommunication and poor utilisation of organisational resources.

So, while long-term goal setting is instrumental to success, setting business objectives forms the basis on which your goals are met.

This is where using an OKR strategy helps. When you set purposeful business objectives using objectives and key results (OKRs), achieving your company’s aims becomes much more straightforward.

Using an OKR approach is an excellent way to transform your business through the application of measurable tasks to achieve key objectives.

While this may sound simple, knowing how to introduce an OKR approach into your organisation is not easy. Here at 10vmany, we can help.

Using our OKR canvas will enable you to create a framework that will help you to build measurable objectives.

Setting Business Objectives

Right now, your business may have a key goal that it is striving to achieve.

This goal could be to become the market leader in your industry or to outsell the leading brand year-on-year. However, to fulfil your primary goal, you will need to first take smaller steps to get there.

Your business needs to take a strategic, holistic approach to achieve its primary goal.

But, your teams will also need to commit to working towards smaller objectives that will help to achieve this main goal.

These objectives will be more specific and will form your OKR strategy.

Examples of business objectives could be:

• Increase brand awareness

• Increase customer conversion rates

• Build social media presence

When setting purposeful business objectives as part of your OKR strategy, you need to take the following steps:

What is the objective?

When you set business objectives, all stakeholders need to be engaged in working to make them happen.

Understanding what needs to be achieved and the part they play in making it a reality is essential for employee satisfaction and ensuring everyone is working towards a common goal.

Making sure each team member understands what they need to achieve is vital. This will ensure employee performance can be effectively evaluated when working toward the objective.

An example of an objective could be that your sales teams exceed your main competitor’s sales volumes.

However, achieving this objective requires a clear, focused approach.

OKRs are outcome-oriented | 1ovmany

Is the value proposition clear?

Ensuring the value proposition is clear is essential.

Your team needs to know more than simply the actions they need to take.

The team also needs to understand that the objective aligns with the purpose so that true value is achieved.

Therefore, clarity of the business objectives is just as crucial as their being purposeful.

What are your key results?

Deciding on your objectives is essential, but setting your key results is equally important.

Setting key results provides measurable outputs that can be paired with a specific time frame.

This is beneficial, as your team will have clear actions to take and a metric to measure results against.

An example of using key results within your objectives is as follows:

Your business objective could be to increase customer satisfaction.

Your key result could be to improve your customer satisfaction survey scores by 20 per cent by the end of this financial year.

This key result means that your objective can be monitored and measured within a specific time frame.

What will you do to achieve your OKRs?

After setting purposeful objectives and key results, you can plan how to achieve them.

Setting specific tasks that are designed to meet the objectives can be broken down into smaller actions to make them more achievable.

Each of these smaller actions should be designed to ensure that the intended purpose of your objectives is met.

Setting clear, purposeful objectives and guiding your team forward to make them a reality is not easy.

Yet, it is an essential task to help improve your business and drive it toward meeting its strategic goals.

1ovmany can help you achieve your business objectives

At 10vmany, we can work with you to implement OKRs in a manner that corresponds with your business objectives.

We've transformed organisations utilising an OKR approach, enabling them to redefine their criteria for success, deliver on set business objectives and achieve long-term, sustainable growth.