If You Want to Hit Your Goals, Your Team Needs Time to Work on Them
The C-suite was frustrated.
They had been running regular quarterly meetings for years. Leadership was aligned. They implemented OKRs at the senior level and had seen positive results in the business.
Then they rolled out OKRs to the rest of the organization.
During departmental meetings, each team member set goals. Everyone had at least one OKR, a contribution they would make to the overarching objectives of the business.
The C-suite expected momentum to accelerate. Instead, things started falling apart.
OKRs got dropped, quality dipped. The team started getting disgruntled.
I see this scenario regularly, and the issue isn’t “the system.” OKRs work.
What’s really going on here is too much of a good thing.
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Business leaders tend to think of money as their most finite resource. You don’t have the budget to make the next big hire, to invest in the huge marketing campaign, to fully upgrade your technology stack.
But the most finite resource of all is time.
God doesn’t give you more hours in the day just because you have OKRs to complete. If you overload your team members with projects and initiatives on top of their daily work, something has to give. Either the OKRs don’t get done, or the day-to-day work suffers. Maybe, in the short term, a few team members accomplish it all through heroics, but heroics aren’t sustainable.
In almost all cases, roles are less structured at the top of the org chart and get more structured as you flow down through the company. The CEO, for example, has a schedule that looks different every day. They should have plenty of unstructured time on their calendar, for Think Sessions, to work on strategy, to maintain key relationships, etc.
But an independent contributor in service delivery works within a totally different paradigm. They are often driven by billable hours, with client work taking the absolute highest priority and the lion’s share of their time every single day.
If your company aims for 36 billable hours/week, plus 4 hours of internal meetings, and you pile OKRs on top of that? The math doesn’t math. Just because you delegate work doesn’t mean someone has the time to do it.
In general, employees below the middle management level should be primarily focused on hitting their numbers, the key metrics that drive their success in the role and are captured on a scorecard.
Any OKRs should be considered within that context.
Of course, there are ways to accomplish both, but they require changing the status quo:
1. Improve efficiency. Employees can often find ways to work more efficiently and take on an additional project or two. AI tools are right at our fingertips to improve productivity.
2. Work more. Certain employees may be willing to put in additional hours and extra effort to help the company reach its goals. Those are your MVPs, so make sure you acknowledge and reward them accordingly.
3. Reallocate responsibilities. If the team member is the best person to complete the OKR, you may need to delegate some of their billable hours to free up their time.
….That’s it. There is no magical fourth way where the days are 26 hours long instead of 24. These are the options, and you and your team will have to determine the right path forward together.
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A good rule of thumb is to calibrate your team’s OKRs the same way you calibrate their quarterly meetings.
For every level of your business, the quarterly meeting time should be cut in half. For example:
C-suite: Full-day (8 hours)
Departmental (leadership): Half-day (4 hours)
Departmental (front lines): 2 hours
Take a similar approach when setting OKRs. If “Hit Your Numbers” is the only OKR for most of your front-line employees some quarters, that’s completely fine.
If you overcommit, you underperform.
And remember that less is more when it comes to OKRs. The most mature businesses I work with consistently set the fewest OKRs, sometimes working on only one or two initiatives at the senior level. Everything else in the business flows up to those goals. [Check out this newsletter for more on this topic.]
OKRs can transform your business—if you remember that just enough of a good thing is the perfect amount.
