Learning how to write good OKRs for HR teams is a crucial skill for HR managers, Learning and Development professionals, and other roles whose main purpose is to manage people.
OKRs for Internal Communication & Engagement (video)
Improving employee engagement and organizing internal workflows better are the two most popular Objectives in People Management teams.
Cultural changes are hard to measure but we always know when there are internal tensions or inefficient processes. So the struggle is real, and the change for the better would be clearly noticeable.
But how do you reasonably measure the trust level among employees?
It wouldn’t be ethical or productive to track the number of eye rolls or sarcastic comments during the meetings.
But if that is exactly the problem you need to fix, how do you write a good OKR for improving internal communication?
Let’s imagine that you run an HR team in a company with a lot of issues in cross-functional communication.
People don’t seem to know how to work together effectively and they tend to avoid team meetings and don’t ever take a proactive approach to solve problems.
Technically, improving cross-functional collaboration is a responsibility of each team but, without intervention, things are not going to improve. And this is where HR professionals step in.
So let’s say we discovered, thanks to the company-wide survey, that our main issue is the misalignment and continuous struggles in cross-functional communication.
We need to narrow down the problems that we can solve this quarter.
And after a series of interviews and internal brainstorming, we identified the top 3 problems that seem to be causing the most frictions:
- communication between CS and Development on bugs and customer feedback,
- lack of understanding of different teams’ workload and responsibilities, and
- redundant & time-consuming back-and-forth communication between Compliance and Business Development that could be fixed by proper internal documentation.
Solving these issues should have a clear impact on internal communication and pave the way for future improvements.
Based on these conclusions, we can write our quarterly Objective:
Improve internal communication and workflows to reduce rework and misalignment
KR1: Moderate 13 alignment sessions between CS and Development
We need to create a habit of open communication every week so that both teams start relying on each other more and feeling more like being “in the same boat”. The outcome we want to achieve is creating trust and tolerance, and the only thing we can measure is a willingness to participate in weekly meetings.
KR2: Reduce the % of resolved tasks being reopened by the owner for further iterations from 80% to 10%
CS agents say that they are reopening tickets several times after the issues were declared “solved”, and the Development team insists that the tasks are not properly explained and each reopening is an additional sub-task or more information from the customer that wasn’t originally shared. Some intervention is clearly needed.
KR3: Increase weekly satisfaction with communication quality (between Compliance and Business Development) from 2/10 (current) to 7/10
There are a lot of recurring questions between the two teams that could be somewhat resolved by a database with ready-made answers. The Compliance team is understaffed so they have no time to work on creating the answers for the database which is why we will step in, and organize the information they already have to provide easy access for the Business Development representatives. If that doesn’t help, we will keep looking for solutions to improve the quality of communication.
KR4: Organize 7 team presentations with each team presenting their internal wins and challenges
Everyone thinks they are the busiest team in the company and there is some resentment in the air. In the spirit of openness and transparency, we will have each team explain their internal life in a 30-minutes presentation (one team per week). We need to develop some guidelines so that each presentation is a hit.
So this is what a finalized OKR would look like:
Objective: Improve internal communication and workflows to reduce rework and misalignment
KR1: Moderate 13 alignment sessions between CS and Development with at least 80% of team members attending
KR2: Reduce the % of resolved tasks being reopened by the owner for further iterations from 80% to 10%
KR3: Organize 7 team presentations with each team presenting their internal wins and challenges
KR4: Increase weekly satisfaction with communication quality (between Compliance and Business Development) from 2/10 (current) to 7/10
Initiatives:
- Set up a notifications system for the reported and resolved bugs
- Create guidelines for how each task should be phrased, organized and presented
- Organize the FAQ database for the compliance team
- Create guidelines for the team presentation
OKRs for Employee Onboarding
Objective: Create a successful recruitment outreach campaign for Engineering
- Conduct seminars in universities & collect over 100 emails for the talent pool
- Harvest LinkedIn to collect 250 potential new candidates
- Redesign our careers webpage to drive 5% increase in website applicants
Objective: Create a successful recruitment outreach campaign for Engineering
Comment: The company is growing and we will need to hire at least 20 new developers to support our expansion. The recruitment market is highly competitive and we need to stand out with our employer brand to attract top talent. As we cannot offer a higher salary level, we should revise our benefits packages and emphasize the value of our internal academy.
KR1: Conduct seminars in universities & collect over 100 emails for the talent pool
Comment: Pursuing young talent and growing their skillset internally is our best tactic, but traditional career fairs are not giving us enough candidates to work with, so we will take a more proactive approach with topic-specific training seminars.
KR2: Harvest LinkedIn to collect 250 potential new candidates
Comment: We need people with previous experience in the field so that they can become team leaders to guide the younger hires. Linkedin worked for us in the past so we will give it a try. It’s normally much harder to find a good fit for senior positions because our best candidates are usually already employed by other companies.
KR3: Redesign our careers webpage to drive 5% increase in website applicants
Comment: Every company offers the same things to the potential candidates. To stand out, we need to improve the career page significantly, and possibly retarget people who once visit the page. We will work with marketing and design teams on this KR.
OKRs for Recruitment
Objective: Improve the new-hire onboarding process in the Product team to ensure talent retention
- Complete 5 sections of the must-have onboarding toolkit
- Interview 7 team members about their own onboarding experience and what they would improve about it
- Achieve average onboarding satisfaction score of 8/10 points
Objective: Improve the new-hire onboarding process in the Product team to ensure talent retention
Comment: We have had several people who left after 2 months in the company. This ends now. There are a few issues we identified as a top priority: clear role expectations are missing, there are some internal tensions and disagreements, and there is no clear learning path for the new hire. If we are successful with this Objective, we will retain our talent much better.
KR1: Complete 5 sections of the must-have onboarding toolkit
Comment: The 5 must-have sections are: 1-clear role expectations, 2-list of tools and “how-to” guidelines, 3-clear learning roadmap for 4 weeks, 4-arranged meetings agenda with department heads, 5-guidelines for the one-month learning outcomes presentation from the new-hire to their team
KR2: Interview 7 team members about their own onboarding experience and what they would improve about it
Comment: These 1-on-1 interviews will make sure that we are on the same page with the team members and working together to keep the talent on board. Onboarding is the team’s responsibility, and we might need to organize some training for a better understanding of onboarding outcomes.
KR3: Achieve an average onboarding satisfaction score of 8/10 points
Comment: We will measure onboarding satisfaction every week to track the new hires’ experience and intervene if something is off. We also need to continuously collect feedback for further improvement, not just for this team but for onboarding processes in the entire company.
Organizational culture, employee engagement, and motivation, recruitment, onboarding, personal development, scheduling, training, employer branding – these are just a few things that HR managers have on their minds.
The impact of good quality People Management work is very significant and can last for years. But when it comes down to writing OKRs, HR professionals often struggle to define measurable outcomes that they can drive throughout the quarter.
While it’s pretty easy to say that “we want to improve eNPS this year” or “reduce employee turnover by 30%”, these targets don’t make good Key Results. Because it will take much longer than a quarter to impact these numbers but you need to know whether you are on the right track. And your team OKRs are supposed to help you focus your attention on a specific set of outcomes that would lead to, ultimately, achieving your KPI targets.
Learn more about writing good Objectives and measurable Key Results.