Remote OKR Workshop: A Facilitator's Guide

Explain the core of OKRs: Objectives (aspirational goals) and Key Results (measurable metrics). Highlight benefits like team clarity and focus. Especially important for newcomers! Encourage active participation and questions. Leverage anchoring with relatable examples.

“OKR stands for objectives and key results, a goal-setting framework that helps organizations set, track, and achieve their goals.”

Prepare the Miro board, define focus areas, and curate examples. Invite cross-functional representatives. Emphasize the importance of diverse perspectives for robust OKRs. Set clear expectations and roles. Offer help articles or videos if required. Prepare some quick-start templates to anchor team discussions. Ensure good moderation to remove friction and enhance participation

“It takes about 2 hours to complete and about 10 to 15 minutes to prepare.”

Participants silently generate as many objectives as possible within the focus area (e.g., after-sales team). Encourage 'quantity over quality' for initial ideation. Set a timer for focused creation. Provide ongoing encouragement. The objective of this step is to overcome loss aversion and status quo. Offer a safe space for ideas to be heard without judgement.

“The mindset here is definitely quantity over quality before you begin.”

Participants vote on their top three objectives. Remind them of key criteria: understandable, realistic, and valuable. Emphasize clear and concise objectives that have a clear value for the customers and/or organization or team.

“Now it's time to vote on our objectives, we're going to make a choice of our top three, you each have three voting dots each.”

The decider (e.g., product owner) makes the final call on the top three objectives, considering the team's votes and adding their judgment. Decider is instructed to ask the team for input before making their choice. Facilitate a constructive conversation and offer help if need be. Mitigate anchoring biases to the decider.

“It's time now for the decider to make their final decision about which three objectives to actually go for.”

Participants generate key results for each of the chosen objectives. Reinforce that key results should be measurable, specific, and time-bound. Use clear and concise descriptions of the key results. Re-iterate the importance of focus.

“It is now time to generate key results for each of those top objectives, and this exercise is very similar similar to the last time around.”

Participants vote on the top key results per objective (three dots per objective). Emphasize that key results should describe outcomes, not activities. The exercise should be fast and straightforward.

“Now we're going to vote on our top key results per objective, you each have three dots per objective.”

The decider chooses the top three key results per objective, facilitating discussion and potentially adjusting the key results on the fly. Decider should be given enough time to think clearly. Encourage them to edit on the fly.

“The deciders is instructed to ask for input from the team, from the participants about the different key results before making their final call.”

Discuss and agree on the frequency for reviewing the OKRs (e.g., weekly, monthly). Depends on your team needs. Remember to follow up and make sure that progress is happening.

“The next step is simply to decide how often you want to review your OK Arts cuz 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.”

Send out calendar invites for the agreed-upon review meetings. The OKRs are quite pointless if you don't follow up and make sure that you actually achieve and and make progress.

“Remember to, of course, send out the calendar invites for those reviews, but other than that, that is a workshop to produce okay RS as a team.”