Aligning your OKRs is an important step if you would like an effective, successful OKR program. Profit.co makes this process as seamless as possible with intuitive alignment options.
Profit.co allows you to cascade or roll-up your OKRs. With both top-down and bottom-up alignment, users can assign and delegate OKRs with precision, so that all targets are accounted for, and responsibility is clearly distributed to different members of a team or organization.
In this article, we’ll review the different options for top-down and bottom-up alignment in Profit.co.
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Cascading OKRs: Top-down Alignment
When cascading your goals in Profit.co, you have two options. First, you can assign your Key Result as an Objective for a lower level of the company. Or, you can assign sub-key results off of your key results.
Let’s start with the following OKR example: Adam, the VP of Marketing, has an OKR to “Improve Web Presence”. He can align this OKR in two ways. Let’s take a look:
1. Assigning Key Result as an Objective
Adam can assign one of his department-level key results as an objective for a team or individual. When assigning a key result as an objective, Adam is tasking the assignees with the task of coming up with their own key results to fulfill this objective. All progress that the assignees make on their objective will translate as progress on Adam’s key result, so everyone is working on the same goal.
In our example, Adam assigns the Key Result “Grow Social Media Presence” to Susan, the Director of Social Media Marketing, as an Objective. Susan then creates her own key results to accomplish this goal. She can do this in collaboration with Adam as well as other stakeholders. Here is what that alignment looks like:
All progress that Susan makes on her three key results will translate to progress for her Objective, “Grow Social Media Presence”, which will move Adam’s Key Result, and his Objective to “Improve Web Presence”.
2. Sub-Key Results
Sub-key results in Profit.co are a way to break down a key result and delegate responsibility for a specific target or process, or evenly distribute responsibility for a key result. Sub key results are listed on the same OKR as the Key Result, and will all be tracked separately. All progress will propagate upwards, to the key result which will contribute to the Objective progress.
For example, let’s say that Jerry Vanderbilt, the Director of SEO, has an OKR to Improve Organic Traffic, and has set the following key results:
KR1: Increase the avg. time visitors spend on a page from 3min to 4.5min
KR2: Increase organic visitors from X to Y
KR3: Improve average CTR from Google Search for blog posts from 5% to 10%
For the third key result to improve the click through rate of certain blog posts, there are a lot of initiatives that a SEO team can take to improve this rate. Instead of delegating this key result as an OKR and having an individual team member build out a series of key results for a new objective, Jerry can simply create sub-key results off of this key result.
A sub-key result that Jerry might use would be to “Revamp 10 meta titles and meta descriptions” he could assign this to his Content Developer, Maggie Smith.
Another sub-key result could be to “Identify 12 target keywords for existing blog posts”. He could assign this to his SEO Analyst, Greg Jones.
These two sub-key results are individually assigned to Maggie and Greg, however they are still a part of the OKR to Improve Organic Traffic. Any progress that Maggie and Greg make will be reflected in the key result to Improve the average CTR.
Rolling Up OKRs: Bottom-up Alignment
In contrast to cascading OKRs, there may be instances where it’s important for alignments to come from the bottom-up. In some cases, individual contributors may have more insight into customers’ thoughts or other ideas that don’t necessarily reach the executive level. Taking into account employees’ ideas and contributions when creating and aligning OKRs can motivate employees to complete their goals and give them a stronger sense of accountability and ownership.
To roll-up OKRs in Profit.co, individuals or teams can write their own OKR, and add their Objective as a Key Result to a higher-level OKR.
To help visualize this, let’s use the same employees in our above example. Jerry has an objective that he’d like to align with Adam. To do so, he would add his objective “Increase Paid Traffic from X to Y” as a key result to Adam’s objective “Improve Web Presence.”
This connection is established after prior discussion between Adam and Jerry.
The progress that Jerry makes on his Objective will reflect as progress on the Key Result on Adam’s OKR.
Profit.co allows your team to gain full transparency into OKRs across the entire organization, making creating alignments easier, and ensuring that teams stay aligned throughout the entire quarter.
To learn how you can align your goals in Profit.co, book a free demo with our OKR experts today!