What are the implications of Google s OKRs for domestic companies?

Mondo Technology Updated on 2024-01-28

Keywords: Googleokr

As a continuous and cyclical process, Google's performance review is composed of five important parts, which are goal setting, self-evaluation, peer evaluation, calibration meeting, and performance interview. There is a close relationship between the five components, and any failure in the implementation of any one of them will have a negative impact on the entire performance appraisal system.

1. Goal setting

Google's goal setting has its own characteristics, and that is the well-known goal setting OKRs. OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results, are a sophisticated, rigorous, and fully numerical approach to internal objective assessment. It is able to run the target from the top down to the grassroots. The idea of OKR comes from Drucker's goal management. Less than a year after Google was founded, its director, investor John Doerr, brought the process to Google, where it continues to use today.

After the successful implementation of Google, the OKR method has been used by other well-known IT companies, including LinkedIn, Zynga, etc., and OKR has gradually been recognized by more and more IT companies. At present, in addition to Google, Intel, Oracle, and LinkedIn, domestic Wandou Pod and Zhihu have begun to use the OKR management model.

The implementation process of Google goal-setting OKRS includes: setting goals, forming a goal system, evaluating and scoring, and making the score public.

Google's goal setting requires the participation of all employees in the company, supporting and cooperating with each other. The goal is to have annual OKRs and quarterly OKRs. Quarterly OKRs are not easily changed once they are determined, and annual OKRs dominate the whole year, but they are not fixed and can be adjusted in the course of the financial year. Its pyramid system is as follows:

All staff set. Companies, departments, managers, and employees all set their own annual and quarterly goals starting with strategy.

From top to bottom. The order in which goals are set should be headquarters, company executives, teams and individuals.

Goal consensus. The goal must be a consensus after direct and full communication between the manager and the employee, and the goal that is not agreed upon cannot be counted as the goal, and the goal setting ends with reaching a consensus. When setting OKRs, it is a two-way communication process between employees and managers, and managers cannot order employees, and employees can also make suggestions.

Targets are specific and measurable. The most basic principle of goal setting is the SMART principle. For example, instead of saying "I want to make my ** better" in general terms, you should come up with specific goals such as "30% faster" or "15% more engagement".

Ambitious goals. The essence of OKR is to encourage employees to break through their own abilities, and the O (objective) that needs to jump up to achieve is a qualified O.

Set a maximum of about 3 O's in a quarter, and too many goals can be overwhelming. It is also best not to disassemble the KR indicator under each o. Make sure that everyone's OKR worksheet is concise and concise.

2. Google OKRS scoring

At the beginning of each quarter, each employee needs to determine their OKRS for the current quarter, and at the end of a quarter, they need to score their OKRS according to their work completion in the quarter. The OKRS score is not directly related to the performance level of the final year, and the OKRS score is not linked to bonuses, annual salaries, or many appraisal benefits. This score actually makes the manager more aware of the employee's ability to work and the state of work. The real performance appraisal will be conducted on all employees once every six months, mainly to review (review) the performance of employees in the past six months, and change the job ladder (business rank) and salary according to the evaluation results.

One of the most important features of Google's goal-setting OKRs is its transparent system, and all employees' goal-setting OKRs are open to the public. At the beginning of each quarter, the CEO of the company first sets up the company's OKRs and puts them in his own database, which everyone can see. Immediately after that, the company's president, department managers, and company employees set their own OKRs from top to bottom. On the one hand, the transparency system of OKRS can be more fair and transparent, and on the other hand, it also provides a sample of better learning and Xi growth for each colleague, and motivates everyone to meet higher quality challenges and be strict with themselves in their work.

Google OKRS RatingGenerally speaking, 1 is the total score of the score, reaching 06~0.7 is more reasonable. If 04 below, it means that you still need to work hard if you fail. If you get a point, which means that your goal is 100% achieved, Google will think that your goal is too easy and too low, and the manager will question you.

, Google Performance Calibration Meeting

Google's current performance appraisal system is graded on a five-level scale, from low to high: Needs Improvement, Consistently Meets Expectations, Exceeds Expectations, Exceeds Expectations a lot, and Excellent. Google's five-level evaluation is not a mandatory distribution in the true sense, its evaluation grade is the lowest level that needs to be improved, and the other four grades are relatively good. The appraisal system mainly tends to motivate and encourage employees.

When the manager determines the five-level evaluation of the employee, each manager needs to send the results of his or her own assessment to a meeting, which is called a calibration meeting. Google performance calibration meetings are usually a meeting of several managers who sit together and explain to the boss the reasons for the different evaluation levels of employees, what is the best thing about the employee, and what are the excellent things. Suppose Manager A has elaborated on the rating of one of his employees, and Manager B or other managers need to give feedback, indicating whether they agree with it or not, and explain the reasons. As a manager, you not only need to explain to your boss, but also to explain to your peers how accurate his evaluation of employees is.

Through performance calibration meetings, ensure that all managers' scores are compared side-by-side, so that they are fair and impartial.

6. Google performance interview

After the performance calibration meeting, at the company level, it means that the company has reviewed and approved the appraisal results of each employee, and the next thing is for the manager to interview the appraisal results with the employees. The Google Performance Interview is divided into two interviews, the first is the Performance Outcome Interview, which focuses on the employee's career development;The second is a salary increase and promotion interview. Because Google thinks that an employee who is too focused on salary and promotion is not necessarily a good employee, they talk about the two separately. The interval between the interviews is about a month.

In China, many companies interview the assessment results together with salary increases and promotions. In order to ensure the effectiveness of performance interviews, Google usually trains managers to tell them how to talk, what topics to talk about, how to communicate more harmoniously, and how to improve performance plans and achieve program goals.

*: Case Network.

At present, the performance evaluation of many domestic enterprises often has the following problems: the goal setting is contracted by the appraiser or manager, and personal factors are not considered, which is not conducive to stimulating creativity;The performance is directly linked to the salary, and the lack of core performance management awareness makes it difficult for employees to establish a correct concept of performance, and there are antagonistic feelings towards performance managementIn addition, some companies lack feedback mechanisms for performance evaluations and have low utilization of performance evaluation results. Google's OKRs have reference significance in three aspects: goal setting, utilization of performance evaluation results, and feedback of performance evaluation results.

In terms of goal setting, according to the practical experience of large and medium-sized enterprises accumulated by Huaheng Zhixin over the years, many enterprises in China often encounter the following difficulties when setting performance management goals: the performance goals issued by the superior cannot be implemented at all;The goal is too idealistic, not very operable, and so on. This is because goal setting is singular and focuses on the top down, ignoring the communication elements of performance management. Google's goal setting requires managers and employees to reach a consensus after direct and full communication, and when setting goals for OKRs, it is a two-way communication process between employees and managers, managers cannot order employees, and employees can also make suggestions. The advantage of this goal-setting method is that through full communication, the operability of the goal is enhanced, and at the same time, the effectiveness of human resource allocation can be improved by sorting out the needs of employees in communication and promoting mutual support between departments and enterprises.

Secondly, the scoring of OKRS is not linked to the bonus annual salary, and it is not linked to many assessment benefits. This can clarify the purpose of OKRS performance management: to make managers more aware of the ability and status of employees, and help motivate employees to continuously improve. At present, after the introduction of OKR, many companies in China still link the evaluation results to salary and benefits and job adjustments, so that employees work for performance and have resistance to performance evaluation, and the result is that performance performance is decoupled from the original intention of management. The analysts of Huaheng Zhixin believe that we should pay attention to the management objectives in the multi-dimensional performance evaluation, improve the behavior of employees in the organizational work through the evaluation and analysis of performance, and give full play to the potential and enthusiasm of employees.

Third, Google has increased the use of OKRS assessment results by conducting calibration meetings and performance interviews. Performance feedback and implementation is a very important part of performance evaluation, which determines the final effect of performance management. Again, it is a manifestation of focusing only on performance evaluation and ignoring performance management. In the process of serving enterprises for many years, Huaheng Zhixin has designed a set of target performance management system based on the characteristics of Chinese people, which mainly includes four stages: job classification and classification, implementation and issuance of task indicators, process inspection and supervision, and result feedback and implementation. Only the performance management system that is indispensable to the four links can truly and effectively operate and support the development of enterprises.

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