OKR was initiated by Intel and promoted by Google, and then well-known domestic companies such as Huawei and Baidu also actively introduced it. 20 17 Huawei's internal performance satisfaction survey shows that OKR team's satisfaction in all dimensions of performance management is higher than that of the team adopting traditional performance management methods.
After the Spring Festival of 20 19, there was an OKR reform storm in Baidu. This storm has swept almost all Baidu employees, from the top decision-making level to the bottom employees, and no one can stay out of it. This storm also stimulated the reconstruction of Baidu's culture and management system. As the helm of Baidu, Li Yanhong stood at the center of the storm in a sense, and as a key figure, he also built OKR for himself in the first time.
It can be said that KPI is a performance management system that most enterprises are using at present. Huawei also used the KPI assessment method for more than ten years before 20 15. So, what kind of opportunity did Huawei switch from KPI to OKR? As an ordinary company, is it necessary to try OKR?
After reading this article, you will know that "copying" a company's successful model is not that simple.
What is OKR?
OKR (Objectives and Key Results) is a simple and effective enterprise objective management system. This system was developed by Intel, but it is widely known by Google. It is a set of management methods to define and track goals and their completion, aiming at ensuring that employees work closely together and focus on measurable contributions that can promote organizational growth.
OKR has the following characteristics:
1, coordinate the unification of all employees' goals. To the company-> Team-> Personal goals are decomposed layer by layer, so that everyone can not only pay attention to their own work, but also see the overall development goals of the company, understand their role in the overall goals of the team and the company, and make their work more meaningful and thus more positive.
2. Understand the priorities. By combing OKRs, managers can find out the most important things, thus coordinating the whole company to focus on the most valuable things and make the most effective use of resources.
3. Two-way communication. The formulation of OKRs is jointly formulated by managers and employees at all levels, and requires the consent of both parties, so as to change the situation that leaders only release it in one direction and employees only passively accept it. In addition, it will help to strengthen the understanding and recognition of goals and tasks, and the goals of all teams can be linked together in a unified way, which can support each other and encourage innovation. Top-down task assignment, employees lack the process of thinking and communication, and under OKRs, employees have the autonomy to set challenging goals, rather than sticking to the framework set by the company. It can often inspire and produce some unexpected new ideas and results.
4. Timely and flexible. For start-ups with unclear business goals, it is necessary to constantly explore and constantly adjust their goals. By managing goals and tasks through OKRs, you can adjust key goals and directions in time. In addition, the key scores in OKRs can be flexibly adjusted at any time according to the situation during the review process.
OKR can actually be divided into two words, O is the goal and KR is the key result. The meaning of goal "O" is a qualitative description of the expected development direction of the organization in a certain period of time. In layman's terms, it is "what are we going to do".
From KPI to OKR, Huawei has done this.
Compared with KPI system, OKR pays more attention to target management, stimulates employees' internal motivation and gives employees greater initiative in setting goals. OKR separates goals from assessment, allowing employees to set goals spontaneously and manage them in the process of achieving them, instead of assessing them according to the established goals and completion rate, thus reducing the pressure on employees and stimulating their self-motivation.
Huawei began to try OKR system from 20 15. According to Kuang Yang who participated in the OKR system at that time, Huawei used OKR for internal and external reasons. The internal reason is the company management problem fed back by employees at that time, and one quarter is the performance management problem, which is the touch point within the enterprise. The external reason is that many well-known large enterprises are gradually abolishing the performance appraisal mechanism.
For example, on 20 12, Adobe was the first to announce the cancellation of performance rating; Subsequently, General Electric (GE) officially announced the cancellation of the performance appraisal mechanism in 20 15. 2065438+February 2006, IBM wrote "Goodbye PBC, HelloCheckpoint" in an email to its internal employees, officially announcing the cancellation of the annual performance appraisal mechanism, and instead evaluating employees' work performance from five dimensions: "business achievements, impact on customers' success, innovation, sense of responsibility to others and skills". The feedback of internal employees' performance management and the changes of external enterprises' performance management brought pressure to Huawei executives at that time. Which direction should Huawei's performance management go?
With the development of the enterprise, Huawei executives realized that relying solely on customer-driven has been unable to make the enterprise move forward. As the Ford brothers said when they invented the car, "When you go out on the street and ask citizens what kind of car they need, they will only tell you that you need a faster carriage, not a car." Jobs's idea is that the real big innovation is not developed in the market, but needs enterprises to give full play to their creativity, constantly try new products and let customers know and try.
The specific promotion methods of Huawei OKR are as follows:
1. Try to promote it through the consulting department.
When Huawei implements OKR, it is not mandatory, but takes OKR as a consulting department to provide services and support for other departments within the enterprise. Which department needs OKR system or encounters problems in the process of OKR promotion and implementation, it will seek help from this consulting department.
Huawei's promotion of OKR started from some departments. In Huawei, the R&D department is the department that needs the most initiative and innovation, so the promotion of OKR starts from some R&D departments. By 2065438+May 2006, OKR pilot has achieved remarkable results in some teams. An obvious feature of Huawei is that after a new model is proved to be effective, it will soon be promoted and spread throughout the company. Therefore, from May 20 16 to April 20 17, OKR's promotion in Huawei was very fast.
From 2065438+April 2007, the promotion of OKR in Huawei entered a stage of slow progress, because the top management of the company considered that there were many departments in Huawei, and the situation of each department was different. If the OKR system is promoted throughout the company, it may bring management risks. Thus, from April 20 17 to May 20 18, the promotion of OKR in Huawei entered a low tide.
For non-innovation-driven departments, Huawei is in no hurry to implement OKR. For example, in the marketing department, it is more advantageous to use KPI system for performance appraisal, so Huawei still uses KPI system in the marketing department.
So, what impact does OKR's promotion have on Huawei?
First of all, OKR system stimulates employees' self-motivation and innovation ability. Therefore, in the process of project research and development, more new ideas and ideas will be put forward, the research and development ability of new products will be enhanced, and the speed of developing new products will also be improved.
Secondly, when KPI was used for assessment in the past, many projects did not set challenging goals. After adopting OKR, team members are more willing to try new things and set challenging goals.
Finally, the implementation of OKR has increased the number of employees actively looking for tasks in enterprises, and employees do not need bosses or leaders to supervise themselves in real time; Because it can give full play to the initiative of employees, the growth speed of employees has also become faster; At the same time, because employees have higher freedom, project plans can be put forward from the bottom up, so there are more bottom-up suggestions and plans, and some plans and suggestions are implemented more smoothly.
Think twice before imitating.
So, does this mean that OKR is an example that all domestic enterprises should follow? No, because the value that OKR can provide to most domestic enterprises is very limited.
Because most domestic enterprises have "fixed" and "clear" goals, the demand for OKR is fundamentally eliminated. How to understand? In traditional manufacturing, logistics, construction, retail, education, finance, and even e-commerce, new media and other industries, everyone has the characteristics of "fixed demand and clear process".
In this case, if you want to motivate and spur the team to progress, it is enough to use the most primitive KPI management. Because there are standards to follow, benchmarks to refer to, and enough big data to learn. At this time, if you bypass KPI and do OKR, it is unnecessary and even self-defeating.
Some bosses may think that my business exploration is a "new problem", so I am still willing to try OKR boldly. Then, before implementation, please be sure to consider the following points:
Meituan is known as the fourth largest Internet company in China. Its founder Wang Xing said, "For a problem, first judge whether it is a new problem or an old one. If it is an old problem, someone must have solved it or tried to solve it. Then who is the benchmark? Just find this benchmark and learn from it. What if it's a new problem? There are generally no new problems. " Therefore, "generally, there will be no new problems". The Internet industry, which has only developed in recent years, is still the case, not to mention a traditional industry with a long history, profound accumulation and mature development.
The essence of OKR is a set of management methods, and it needs to innovate the working concept of the team from the inside out, with the emphasis on the word "management". No matter how well the OKR is formulated, if the most important thing of the enterprise is not done well, it will not work. For enterprise managers, there are many things that can be done, and it is always the first to concentrate on the most important things, such as "making food taste better", "making delivery faster", "making service quality better than competitors" and "trying to make customers willing to buy again".
Before touching the ceiling, enterprises should use limited resources to release and consolidate their core competitiveness. Give full play to the advantages of core resources, and never make great efforts to overthrow and start over, and rashly engage in a change with unknown success or failure.
Which companies are suitable for OKR?
OKR is so hot that many companies are eager to try it. However, any management method has its advantages and limitations. Even if Huawei and Baidu introduce OKR, it is not a total denial of KPI.
Then, according to the characteristics of OKR, which companies are suitable for using OKR?
The strategic objectives of entrepreneurial companies are not clear and need to be confirmed through continuous exploration. Therefore, the management mode of OKR can help the management to try and make mistakes and correct them through regular re-inspection. In addition, entrepreneurial companies are short of people, money and popularity, and the OKR model can make the company's limited resources more concentrated.
Because OKR has the characteristics of encouraging innovation, it is very suitable for innovative companies such as the Internet and high technology. A very important reason why companies such as Huawei and Baidu can successfully implement OKR is that most of their employees are high-quality knowledge-based talents, and the company also has such an innovative corporate culture. Relatively speaking, those assembly-line manufacturing enterprises don't necessarily need OKR, because the employees' work objectives are clear, and it is enough to complete these quantifiable indicators.
In this era, change is the biggest feature. In the fierce market competition, many large enterprises began to seek transformation and change. For example, Baidu introduced OKR at that time, which was based on this background. An employee of Baidu once said: "In the KPI era, it is enough for management to only care about their own affairs. Since OKR is here, we all need to care about the affairs of the company. From top to bottom, we should coordinate which project the company wants to support. Everyone wants Qi Xin to work together. "
abstract
Generally speaking, OKR is indeed a very efficient performance management mechanism, which is goal-oriented, pays equal attention to results and processes, and emphasizes employees' independent creativity, thus making employees more willing to go out of the comfort zone and explore more possibilities. OKR is more suitable for creative and creative-intensive industries. If the company is in an industry with clear requirements for business performance, such as education, e-commerce, finance, retail, manufacturing, etc. The use of OKR by some teams will increase the cost of collaboration and make better use of traditional performance management.
What I want to remind you here is that all the seemingly advanced methods we see at present are based on our own commercial energy, and both personnel quality and business model are suitable for collaboration through OKR. The successful application of OKR requires a good human resource foundation and a cooperative atmosphere of the company. It is undeniable that it is difficult for most domestic companies to meet this condition.
Whether it is OKR or other tools, we should treat their value dialectically, analyze the internal reasons of their value and correctly judge whether they are suitable for us. After all, no company's management achievements are achieved by "blind obedience".