 Hi, I'm Johan, Product Designer and Facilitator and in this video I'm going to show you how to run a remote OCR workshop step by step and I'm going to give you a mirror template to make your life even easier. So what are OKRs? OKR stands for objectives and key results and it's a goal setting framework that helps organizations set track and achieve their goals. One of the main advantages of OCRs is their ability to provide teams with clarity on what to focus on and how success will be measured. Objectives. These are clear, concise statements on what is to be achieved. It should be short, inspirational and engaging. Objectives are significant, concrete and very action-oriented and ideally they should be inspiring as well. Moving on to key results. These are the measurable quantifiable metrics that show progress towards the objective. They are milestones or steps that need to be reached to achieve the objective. A good key result is describable in numbers either as a binary yes or no or as a progress from 0 to 100 percent. All right, some quick basics about this workshop. It takes about two hours to complete and about 10 to 15 minutes to prepare. I recommend that you keep the amount of participants somewhere between three to 10 people. Any more than that and you will struggle with time management. Speaking of who should partake in this exercise, I recommend that you try to think cross-functional as much as possible. You need to include representatives both from the people that will execute towards the goals and the people managing and are responsible for that execution. For example, if you're on a product team, common participants are a product owner, you have developers there, maybe data analysts, they're really good at setting key results by the way, product or UX designers. A good mix of people that are on the management level and on the execution level. The basic structure of this workshop is you begin with an introduction about OKRs for any participants that aren't familiar with the concept and then you move on to co-creating a large number of objectives and key results. And then you together vote and distill these down to your top three most important OKRs. And finally, you wrap up by defining some next steps and scheduling follow-ups for these OKRs. By the way, while you're watching this video, if you have any questions about the steps that I'm showing you, please leave them in a comment below. All right, let's get started with the workshop. All right, so you've come to the first exercise. It's time to ideate some objectives. The mindset here is definitely quantity over quality. Before you begin, you of course have to give your participants some proper instructions. So begin by showing them this area here on the board. Okay, give them the instruction that this is an exercise that's going to be happening together alone, meaning there will be no discussion. This will happen in silence. You will create for 10 minutes as many objectives as you can within our focus area. The mindset is quantity over quality and we will filter later and also show them now the focus that you prepared ahead of time for this fictional example. We're an after sales team. So simply just remind them to write objectives that are in the area of responsibility for the after sales department, essentially things that our team can influence and then move over to showing some examples. It's really important to show participants examples of what they're supposed to produce. So just show them the examples, maybe read one or two of them, improve customer satisfaction with after sale services, increase the number of customers using after sale services, then move over to show everyone that they have their own column to work within. Before you let them get started, ask the participants, does anyone have any questions? And if not, set a timer for 10 minutes and get started. All right, so everyone is producing tons of objectives and the timer is about to run out a little bit of a facilitator tip here. When the timer is about to run out, make sure you ask people, do you want more time or not? Usually someone do need some more time, you just click here to add another minute or two. Also have a glance around as the facilitator here, you're going to notice that some people are completely finished, they're not writing any objectives anymore, you could encourage them to, you know, write some more if you can. But also, if you're closing in on the last few seconds on the timer, you can do some cleanup. I like to do some cleanup here, removing some of the empty ones. That'll make it easier in the next step when we're voting. But of course, don't start doing this, if you see that someone is still writing, don't remove their stickies that they might need. All right, so when the timer has run out, now you hopefully have a big selection of objectives to choose from. We have close to 50 here maybe, but obviously we can't go for all of these, that wouldn't make sense. We have to filter it down and make a choice of our top three objectives in this exercise. I've chosen top three here for this workshop, but feel free to adjust that to your preference. Just make sure that you adjust the amount of voting dots here on the board to reflect the amount of objectives you want to go for. All right, give your participants the instructions. Now it's time to vote on our objectives. We're gonna make a choice of our top three. You each have three voting dots each. You are allowed to vote on your own objectives if you feel like that one is the best. And you may put multiple voting dots on a single objective if you really feel like this is the strongest one. And also make sure you show the participants how to do the actual voting. You can either drag a voting dot like so, but if you're on the far right here that might come quite annoying, so you can also copy or cut by pressing Command C or Command X or Control C or Control X on a Windows computer. Scroll over and then paste Command V or Control V on Windows. And wherever you have your cursor, the voting dot will end up very handy. A final little instruction apart from the voting rules. It's also helpful to remind them of what you're voting for here. Give them some guidance. Ask them to look for objectives that they think is understandable without further explanation. They're supposed to be clear and understandable, right? Evaluate if the objectives seem realistic or not. And if it seems to have any clear value for the customers and or our organization or team. Ask them to keep that in mind while voting. Finally, ask if anyone has any questions and set a timer for five minutes. Remind them this is an exercise also done together and alone. No discussions. It will happen in complete silence when the timer runs out. We move on to the next step. Let's vote. All right, people are almost finished voting. If you still have a minute left on the clock, ask the participant does anyone need more, any more time. And if not, let the timer run out and bring everyone's attention back to you. It's time now for the decider to make their final decision about which three objectives to actually go for. If you want to find more information about voting like this and more information about the decider, go watch my colleague Dom's video here at Adrian Smart, which is great on this topic. It's called the three most effective voting techniques for decision making. The decider will now choose the top three objectives to actually go for. They are asked to consider the team's voting now, but it's also made clear that they can actually completely ignore that voting if they wish. They can make a choice that if Ellie here feels like this is the best objective, I feel very strongly about this one. He can choose that one if he wants to. But this is also another unique part of the workshop where discussion is actually encouraged again. The decider is instructed to ask the team for input before making their choice if they want to. So Ellie here might look at the voting here and see, okay, enhanced tracking and reporting of after sales metrics, two votes. I think that really makes sense. I agree with that. I'm going to choose that as one of our top three objectives. And then Ellie might ask the team, for example, Rebecca here, improve after sales service quality. What did you mean by that? Do you have any more clarifications about that one? Okay, yeah, I think that makes sense. Let's go for that one too. And so on until Ellie, your decider now has chosen their top three objectives. Again, it's also good to remind the decider. Make sure to evaluate the objectives. Are they meaningful? Are they inspiring? Do they have any clear value for our team or our organization or our customers? And the final instruction to the decider before they get going and start the discussion and make their choices. Tell them you have five minutes to complete this exercise. I'm going to start the clock. Let's go. All right now. So the decider has made their final call by placing their star votes on their top three objectives. And it's now time for the first break. Simply tell your participants it's now time for a quick break. You're gonna put five minutes on the clock and instruct them to not be late. Please be back within five minutes when you let them go. It's time for you as the facilitator to make a small little preparation before the next exercise starts. Go ahead and grab the top three voted objectives and grab these. I'm holding down shift to grab them all and then command C to copy them. And we move over here to the key results ideation exercise. You see these top these top voted objective stickies. We're just gonna put these over here and we could either just drag them on top of here or copy the text, put them here and the font size is a little bit larger here. So why not do this and that last third one over here. Now we have the three top voted objectives placed here so that everyone can look at them whilst ideating key results for each of them in the next exercise. All right break time is over and your decider has made a choice for your top three objectives. It is now time to generate key results for each of those top objectives. And this exercise is very similar to the last time around and in terms of facilitation walk through the instructions first, show them examples first. Really important that you show examples that clarify what are what are what is a good key result. It's supposed to be measurable, very specific, preferably time bound and a little bit aggressive meaning it's kind it's supposed to stretch you to you know improve and work a little bit harder than usual maybe. What's different this time around as well is that now you have these three big columns that every participant needs to work with in. The mindset is still quantity over quality. They're supposed to generate as many key results they can but for each of these objectives so encourage them to not get stuck on one of the objectives. Move on and generate key results for all of them and ask your team if they have any questions before get going and again start a timer for 10 minutes for this exercise and let's get going. All right and people are generating a multitude of key results here and when the timer is about to run out remember to ask if anyone needs any more time if not let the timer run out that's normal. All right in terms of voting this is going to be quite similar to the last round of voting but a little bit different in terms of it being three actual columns that you're supposed to vote on. The instructions to the participants are just like last time now we're going to vote on our top key results per objective. You each have three dots per objective you may vote on your own key results and you also may put multiple voting dots on a single key result if you think it's the best and before you let the participants go it's helpful to give them a little bit more guidance on like what makes a good key results right. A key result should you know describe an outcome not the activity to achieve that outcome so make it measurable and also make sure that it's a little bit you know aggressive kind of a stretch something that isn't used business as usual. Ask if anyone has any questions if not go ahead and start the timer for five minutes ask them to start voting in silence no discussion. All right voting has now completed and it's now again time to defer to our decider to make the final call about which three key results per three objectives we're gonna go for. And similar to last time during this part discussion is once again actually encouraged the decider is instructed to ask for input from the team from the participants about the different key results before making their final call. We're gonna give the this section a little bit longer we need 10 minutes for this because the decider has three key results to choose three times per each three objectives. Also give the decider that guidance again to look for those key results that feel specific time bound they feel aggressive yet realistic and make sure that they are measurable in some way. I want to show you an example one discussion on one event that might occur that actually usually occurs during the decider discussions. So let's say Ellie has completed the voting on the first section he's going to move on to the second objective and he looks at this one that has three votes by the team obviously the team likes this one but Ellie the smart guy that he is he realizes that okay the objective is improve after sale service quality that's the objective and how will we measure that by reduce the time taken to resolve after sale service issues by 25%. Ellie knows that 25% improving that it's actually quite easy once you start doing some actions he's seen this before so he actually proposes a nasty team what do you think about stretching this a little bit and going up to 40% and the team might not concur and say yeah sure let's do that and it's perfectly fine to actually you know edit on the fly here okay let's change that to 40% that's our chosen key results now for for this objective let's pick two more and the discussion moves on so that's perfectly fine that's that's okay to do that too all right so the timer runs out you hopefully had a fruitful discussion and the decider managed to pick three key results per objective and you now have your top three okay ours and just to make it a little bit more clear and visualize it for the team use the facilitator after the decider vote is done uh just copy the top three K ours key results and including the objective here you're just gonna copy those move over over here clean it up a little bit and visualize it clearly all right so enhance tracking and reporting after sales metrics these are three key results for that you can drag these little arrows to make it even more clear as measured by these three key results do the same for the other two lovely jubbly okay why do this well it makes it a lot easier when you want to share your chosen okay ours with other people in the team and the or in the organization having it clean up visualized like this makes it easier to take screenshot you can actually even export uh all the entire frame here save as image and share that so it just makes a little bit more nice and more as give the team a sense of completion look what we created here in this workshop these three awesome okay arts and now finally the next step is simply to decide how often you want to review your okay ours because they're quite pointless if you don't follow up and make sure that you actually achieve and and make progress on your key results and your objectives i've just put a simple visualized calendar here it makes it a little bit easier to discuss like okay should we do it every monday in march in june in september does that feel okay to everyone maybe you have a weekly sync that comes in a way so this first time we're going to do it on the tuesday it just makes it a little bit easier to agree on what cadence you want to do with your okay ours this frequency it will depend on your team and your needs and so on and you might have key results there are time bound like for example you want to achieve this by august obviously you would need to have some sort of review maybe a little bit time before that or if you need so that you can identify if you need to adjust some teams might prefer monthly or bi-monthly reviews it simply depends on your on your preference and once you've decided your review cadence that's the end of the workshop remember to of course send out the calendar invites for those reviews but other than that that is a workshop to produce okay ours as a team defining clear goals is going to solve many clarity and team alignment issues but it's easy to fall back into old habits and old ways after the workshop has finished so to give your new okay ours the best chance to succeed and actually be achieved make sure that you over communicate and to your team and your organization if you are already familiar with okay ours you probably notice that i've left out a few things on how the key results are designed and set up and so on this workshop is designed to get a small team started on trying out okay ours but if you want to perfect or and go a little bit deeper i would recommend a few resources okay ours was created by the author john doer and he has a book that is called measure what matters so of course read that book he also has a website the measure what matters website and google has a google playbook for setting okay ours that has a lot of inspiration and examples of how to set good okay ours and what are good and bad objectives and key results and so on but again there are a million ways of setting goals and okay ours is just one of them so just focus on creating actual results and let your goals act as a guide not as a prescription just get out there and do stuff and there you have it now you know how to run an okay our workshop to help your team set measure and achieve your goals i hope this video was helpful to you and if you want to see more videos like this make sure to subscribe and hit the bell and if you want to learn more about facilitation and workshops join our free facilitation community over there you'll find thousands of facilitators sharing their experiences resources and tips the link to that community is in the description see ya