We’ve documented our current ROB and started getting our house in order by implementing new rhythms. So what steps are left in the phased plan that allow you to reach your operational excellence goals?
Refine & align OKRs
In order to drive your new ROB, your entire team needs to understand their roles and how their work supports the team’s goals, as well as track their progress.
Using your ROB, you empower your team to do the work that matters. They understand where they fit in the plan, feel supported, and have mechanisms for overcoming blockers or raising issues.
OKRs are an essential part of your ROB because they largely drive decision-making & prioritization.
Developing a robust ROB allows your team to get aligned on key priorities predictably and consistently. OKRs enable you to stay focused on what’s most important and determine how time is spent daily, weekly, and monthly.
Benefits of centering & aligning your OKRs
- Better workload balance. OKRs help make decisions about the work that needs to get done and the work that can be deprioritized.
- Fewer fire drills. It’s impossible in today’s world to eliminate every last minute ask, project, or need. Through prioritization, you give your team agency to handle P0 projects with more control and confidence. Additionally, your ROB will support sacred meetings where your team can raise issues & obstacles and find resolution.
- Fewer meetings & enhanced focus. Meeting overload is hard for everyone. Committing to a predictable, consistent ROB and centering your OKRs for decision-making allows everyone to get the most out of the meetings already on their calendar, without the need for additional invites.
- Fewer ad hoc asks. An optimized ROB gives everything in your OKRs a time & place. By sticking to it, you streamline processes and make it a lot easier for your team to respond to requests for updates, budgets, headcount, etc.
Start with a revision of your existing OKRs
This exercise will happen with, and likely be driven by, your leadership team. The goal is to build, test, and refine OKR scaffolding to train accountability and build execution muscles that can be carried forward as you make changes to your ROB.
Perform a comprehensive review:
- Identify what is prioritized & deprioritized and what your team is accountable for through the end of the current cycle (e.g. quarter, fiscal year, etc.).
- Ensure measures are well-formed, quantifiable, and trackable.
- Put priority OKRs at the center of everything — anchor all meetings, performance management, project triaging, and load-balancing decisions in your OKRs.
Make the end product of this process visible to the rest of your org to show that you & the LT are aligned and committed to focusing on what’s most important for this quarter, year, etc. Your leadership team will drive alignment within their teams against these redefined priorities.
Set up quantifiable measures
You should always set quantifiable goals for your OKRs — but you should also have a set of metrics to judge your ROB efforts on. The benefits of having success metrics in place for your operational excellence programs are twofold:
- You build a supported narrative that you can bring to your peers and executive management to tell your leadership story around strong operations.
- Setting black and white goals can prevent backsliding and silent resistance to your ROB initiatives. You drive accountability and action by outlining a compelling destination and giving you team a way to track their progress.
Your metrics should be focused on understanding ROB-related outcomes. They could also be extended to culture, promotion, manager, or organizational health.
We’ll provide some options to choose from below. Craft your metrics based on your organizational culture.
Hold yourself accountable
You can build these metrics into your own OKRs or assign ownership across your team. For example, the metrics are owned by the Office of the Chief of Staff.
These can be explicit done or not done metrics and should be timeboxed:
- Clarified & focused on priorities
- We have developed killer OKRs for Q1
- We have defined our top three priorities for Q1
- Strengthened team culture
- All team meetings this quarter have stated objectives and outcomes
- We scheduled two culture events this quarter
- We increased attendance for culture events this quarter
- We decreased the number of fire drills in Q1
Source your leadership team
Issue a survey to your LT before, during, and after the change initiative to get feedback on leadership response to organization challenges. These tend to be qualitative, but you can build in yes/no or scaled questions for comparison.
For example, using a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being “very ineffective” and 5 being “very effective”, how would you rate our collective leadership team on the following measures?
- Most of our time is spent on what really matters.
- We minimize time spent reacting to unexpected, unplanned, or past events.
- We allocate time to think about and invest in growth opportunities.
- Decisions are made in a timely manner.
- Our decision making processes consistently yield decisions of high quality.
- We are effective as a team at identifying and managing risks in time to take corrective action.
Leverage existing surveys
Does you company issue a quarterly or yearly survey to assess employee satisfaction? If so, you can leverage the existing survey results as a baseline to measure your ROB change initiative.
However, instead of waiting for the next survey cycle, sample your team’s progress against relevant survey questions at more frequent intervals. This will help you be more agile as you adjust your initiative to be as successful as possible in your org.
Look for measures in your company’s survey that are relevant to your ROB objectives. For example:
- I feel a sense of belonging within my team
- Our team culture supports innovation
- The pace of my work is sustainable
- Leadership communicates a clear sense of direction
- My manager uses OKRs to help me prioritize my work
- I feel supported by my manager
- I understand my role here and how it fits into the company goals
Your ROB toolkit
It can be hard to find a good starting point for your operational excellence goals. By optimizing your ROB, you are making those efforts real, visible, and measurable while keeping workflows rooted in the OKRs and priorities that really matter.
Continue your ROB journey with our series:
- ROB Part 1: Establishing a strong rhythm of business is your shortcut to operational excellence
- ROB Part 2: Get your house in order by implementing your rhythm of business
- ROB Part 3: Use your rhythm of business to refine & align OKRs (you are here!)
- ROB Part 4: The critical role of comms in delivering on your business
Photo by Manuel Nägeli on Unsplash