Don’t let good strategies fail

This story might feel familiar.

A team sets some exciting goals at the start of the quarter. 2 weeks later, no one can remember what the priorities are.

The reason is simple. Weeks are full of meetings, calls, tasks, emails, etc that take your attention away from your objectives. This is especially true for large teams where getting anything done requires the coordination of several teams and the approval of multiple stakeholders.

When teams are small, you can spend a decent amount of time thinking about strategic problems. But that time gets cannibalised by the cost of coordination as you start bringing more people on board. You end up spending most of your time negotiating how to get projects done on time, and there’s little space left to consider if said projects are still the right bets to make.

Then one day, it creeps on you.

You’re all busy doing things, but those things aren’t related anymore to your original goals. Even worse, half of your opportunities haven’t even been explored yet.

And this is how teams end up failing to deliver their expected results.

Great teams get distracted when goals aren’t part of weekly conversations

The best way to deliver outstanding results is to turn goals into habits. But, forming habits doesn’t happen magically by telling the team to do something. You’ll need several things to happen in order to make your OKRs part of your weekly routine.

Install a routine with weekly check-ins

Quarterly OKRs should be tracked on a weekly basis. There’s just so much that happens every week that you can’t afford to go longer without bringing goals to the top of the mind. A 30 minute catch up at the beginning of the week will do wonders to re-align teams and instil the right sense of urgency.

If you frown at this statement, it’s probably because your current process has too much friction in it. Most teams that fight weekly check-ins do so because they haven’t optimised their tooling and workflows.

And that leads to our next point.

Sharing progress needs to be frictionless

It won’t matter much that you wrote a great set of OKRs if tracking progress sucks. People will give you all kinds of excuses to avoid dealing with the spreadsheet or doc that contains their goals.

And why blame them?

If you want goals to be treated seriously, you need to invest in them in the same way that you’ve invested in making working with tasks, designs, or specs easier. It is absolutely possible to turn a costly reporting process into a smooth and pleasant process that you can complete on Monday morning while drinking your coffee.

Transparency needs to be rewarded

The last thing that you need to turn goals into weekly habits is to reward people for sharing their updates. Here “reward” doesn’t mean monetary compensation. It is about creating a sense of satisfaction post-update. If you want to get repeated engagement with team goals, users need to get some sort of positive feedback once they complete their check-ins.

Rewards can take many forms. They can be automated and subtle, like getting a notification when a manager reads an update – it’s a simple way to show someone that their reports are valued. Or they can be more intentional by writing some feedback or acknowledging a great status update with a like.

Going from theory to practice: why Tability is the right platform for you

It wouldn’t be helpful if I left you here with just a set of principles to follow. As mentioned previously, none of this will be possible unless you have the right platform to remove friction from the goal-setting and goal-tracking process.

That platform is Tability.

Tability isn’t born of a desire to create an OKR system. It comes from our experience in companies like Atlassian, Intercom, or Monday, trying to maintain the right urgency to achieve ambitious goals all while wrangling projects and managing fires.

None of the existing systems were designed to keep goals front and centre, and the idea for Tability came from a simple process that made a ton of difference: a weekly email to leadership, with key updates on the same 5-6 metrics that matter.

That weekly email became a helpful habit that quickly highlighted risks and execution gaps – allowing us to execute swiftly in an org having 2,000+ people.

Tability was created to scale that process, and help every team bring goals back at the centre of conversations. Supporting OKRs came after as the framework became the go-to goal-setting methodology.

How Tability creates habits and accountability

Every aspect of Tability is crafted to put goals back at the centre of your weekly routine.

Not only will Tability take care of weekly reminders and reports, it will also give you all the tools you need to identify risks early and connect your strategic projects to your OKRs and team goals.

Installing a weekly routine with Tability

Tability will take care of sending weekly reminders when progress updates are due. The entire system is built for accountability, and the UI will show warnings and out-of-date indicators to offer a strong cue when check-ins are outstanding.

Removing friction with Tability

People should not have to become spreadsheet sommeliers to start tracking their most important goals. Tability has all the features and dashboards you need to set, track, and report on your goals effectively. No more wrestling with excel formulas or having to build your own graphs. No more copy/pasting hell to put together presentations for stakeholders.

There’s also a high correlation between having rapid feedback loops and delivering great results. But at the same time, putting reports together involves a lot of low-value tasks that can consume precious hours (finding data, putting decks together, creating charts…).

Tability can connect to your tools and automate most of the reporting work. Data collection, task syncing, reports building and sharing… Reclaim your time and spend it on the things that bring the most value.

Rewarding transparency with Tability

The more positive interactions users have with a platform, the more likely they are to come back to it. With Tability we think about all the little things that we can do to provide some kind of benefits to people for engaging with their goals.

It can take the form of gamification with the introduction of check-ins streaks that increase when you complete all your check-ins on time. It can be about sending automated notifications when new progress updates are read for the first time. It can be about showing beautiful progress trends and health indicators to give a sense of completion.

And it can also just be about making it easier for your colleagues to react to your updates by making them readily available in their inbox and in their dashboards.

OKRs discussions often focus on risks so it’s all the more important to make ample room for celebrating successes.

We’ll help you become OKR champions too

We’re a product company, but we also have strong opinions on the right way to use OKRs. We’ve published many popular guides and recorded hours of tutorials and masterclasses.

Additionally, we’ve created an innovative goal-setting AI that can both create a complete strategy for you and give you feedback on your existing goals.

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