Utility of an OKR tool

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‍Andrew Grove, the former CEO of Intel, in the 1970s developed the OKR (Objectives & Key Results) framework to help Intel align its objectives and goals with its business strategy. OKRs are a goal-setting mechanism that helps leaders & their teams stay focused and aligned on achieving specific outcomes of different projects. With time, this popular goal-setting and performance management mechanism has been adopted by almost all companies around the world. Moreover, in the hybrid world, where we require a more flexible and dynamic approach to achieve business success, OKR tools are the bread & butter of every team individual & their leaders.

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Now, what is the Asana OKR tool?

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‍Asana OKR is a feature within the Asana project management tool that enables leaders & their teams to set and track goals and objectives and measure progress against them.  With Asana OKR, you can set objectives that are aligned with the overall company goals, and break them down into key results that are measurable and time-bound. Asana OKR also provides a visual dashboard that allows you & your team members to see the progress toward objectives, track the completion of key results and get real-time updates on team performance.

Asana OKR integrates with other Asana features, such as task management and team communication, to enable seamless collaboration and ensuring that everyone is aligned with the objectives and progress towards them. This helps teams stay focused and motivated, and achieve better outcomes.

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How to use the Asana OKR tool?

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1. Set up your workspace: Visit asana.com & sign up to start setting up your workspace. Go through the product-led onboarding process, and build your profile. Finally, invite your peers/co-workers to your workspace.

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2. Set up your company & team goals: After the initial setup, you are ready to use the Asana OKR tool. But, before setting up your OKRs, you need to ensure that you have a clear understanding of your company and team goals. The tool allows you to set goals at different levels, such as company, team, and individual goals. You can use this segregation to have a clear understanding between different goals, their priorities & timelines to help you plan your months, quarters & year better.

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3. Create your projects: Once you have your company & team goals in place, create projects that align with these goals. Your projects can be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound aligning with the SMART goals approach or you can create the projects in the fashion that suits you & your teams the best.

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4. Break down your projects into tasks: Tasks are the specific metrics or milestones that indicate progress toward your projects. Asana OKR allows you to set multiple tasks for each project. This enables team leaders to break the project into bite-sized tasks covering all aspects of their projects.

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5. Assign tasks to team members: Once you have your projects and tasks in place, assign tasks to team members to help them achieve the desired outcomes. The tasks also have the option to assign due dates so you can keep track of outcomes w.r.t. timelines due.

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6. Monitor real-time progress: Asana OKR provides multiple dashboard views that allow you to track progress toward your projects & tasks. You can also use reports to get an overview of team performance.

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7. Update your OKRs regularly: After setting everything up, all you & your team need to do is regularly update the projects and tasks. This will enable you & them to have a real-time measurement of the progress made. You can always adjust the projects & tasks based on changing priorities or circumstances.

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Challenges faced by Managers while using the Asana OKR tool

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1. Requirement of proper training and support: Without proper training and support, team members may struggle to use the Asana OKR tool effectively, leading to frustration and lack of engagement. This might result in wasting a lot of business hours in understanding and navigating through the tools to get the simplest of things done inside it.

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2. Inadequate management: Without regular monitoring, tasks can keep on adding up for anyone from anyone in the team & organization. This leads to confusion & wrong expectations. Fixing this requires a manual effort for managers or individuals to find common ground if the timelines/responsibilities of the task are not mutually agreed upon while assigning.

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3. No flexibility to assign tasks beyond project objectives: Leaders of today also focus on employee growth and have certain agendas for their teams to work & improve upon. There’s no option in the Asana OKR tool to track and facilitate improvement in behavioral and hard skills. Only project goals can be assigned & completed within the tool. Managers find it difficult to assign tasks beyond the scope of hard skills & project goals.

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4. Feedback death after goal completion: When a project/goal ends, there’s the option to communicate feedback within the team. But, after the goal is completed, the feedback isn’t distilled into learning and it is entirely up to individuals to incorporate learnings from the feedback.

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Introducing - The idea of Collaborative Team Development along with OKRs

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The multifaceted approach of getting teams to be productive often results in completing business goals and growing your team in silos. Project management & team management might feel like two separate verticals of leading a team but it's high time we bundle them together and save countless unproductive hours spent providing repetitive feedback that isn’t incorporated into day-to-day progress. We work on projects on a daily basis, and one-off reviews at the end of quarters/years can include near-biases & personal opinions often neglecting year-round performance updates. To tackle this problem we at OnLoop have come up with - Collaborative Team Development (CTD).

Collaborative Team Development is a novel approach for leaders, to build, grow, develop, and sustain teams that strive to be the best. All this, while completing your team outcomes linked to crucial business goals. CTD improves team performance, increases employee engagement, enhances decision-making capabilities, and utilizes resources much more efficiently. By fostering a culture of collaboration and teamwork, hybrid leaders create world-class teams which are well-equipped to achieve their goals.

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Here’s how Collaborative Team Development can help your hybrid teams perform & grow better - 

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1. Fosters a sense of belonging to a close-knit team: Collaborative Team Development emphasizes the importance of working together and promoting team growth. By working together towards a common goal, team members can develop a sense of belonging and feel more invested in the success of the project. This can lead to better morale and work satisfaction.

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2. Encourages communication and feedback: Collaborative Team Development can promote a culture of open communication and encourage team members to share their ideas and opinions. This can lead to a more inclusive work environment where everyone feels heard and valued. Additionally, by providing regular feedback, team members can learn from each other and develop new skills.

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3. Allows for greater productivity: Collaborative Team Development can build a culture of high performance. By bringing together a diverse group of individuals seamlessly connected with each other, the team can achieve better results by allocating resources in a much better way than working in silos in distributed setups. 

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4. Builds a habit of continuous improvement: Collaborative Team Development emphasizes the importance of learning and growth happening regularly and not by one-off review cycles. By providing opportunities for skill development and encouraging feedback, the team can continually improve and evolve over time.

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What more do you achieve when you combine CTD with OKRs?

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1. Develop a culture of regular feedback: CTD breathes on capturing regular feedback. By encouraging this practice, leaders help their team members by sharing their wins and improvements regularly and in real-time which leads to more productive and collaborative work.

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2. Identify areas for improvement: CTD is built to instill a habit of capturing regular feedback against the goals. And, by analyzing the feedback, leaders identify gaps in skills, knowledge, and performance and develop strategies to address them.

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3. Encourage continuous learning: CTD helps leaders encourage continuous learning among their team members. By providing regular feedback, leaders help team members identify their strengths and weaknesses and develop new skills and knowledge to improve their performance.

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4. Encourage accountability: CTD helps leaders encourage accountability among team members. By regularly tracking progress towards objectives and providing feedback on performance, team members are more likely to take ownership of their work and hold themselves accountable for achieving their objectives.

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5. Facilitate coaching and mentoring: CTD facilitates coaching and mentoring among leaders and their teams. Regular captures of feedback help leaders identify opportunities for mentoring, which helps team members develop their skills and grow in their roles.

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6. Enhance employee recognition: CTD supports employee recognition efforts. When team members receive positive feedback for their performance, it boosts their motivation and engagement, and encourages them to continue to perform at a high level.

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7. Increase employee retention: CTD enhances employee retention by showing team members that their opinions and ideas are valued. When team members feel that they are being heard and that their feedback is being acted upon, they are more likely to remain engaged and motivated in their work.   

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We believe in building a culture of high productivity in hybrid teams

OnLoop enables you to supercharge your team’s productivity, just like a fitness tracker. Don’t let your feedback die in the individual projects/goals. Compound them to grow your team better, faster & together.

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How does CTD with OnLoop work?

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A quick snapshot -

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Here’s how OnLoop supercharges your team’s growth while you continue tracking OKRs in Asana -

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1. Onboard your teams: OnLoop is just like a regular app. Share your organization’s joining link and all your team has to do is download the app via that link from App Store or Google Play and done. You can manage the team structure once people join in.

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2. Set individual goals beyond OKRs for everyone: In addition to having OKRs in Asana, you can further categorize the goals for your team members into four categories in OnLoop - Target, Project, Behavioral & Hard Skill. Each goal comes with its unique milestones. This way everyone knows where to start, where to go, and how to reach there. Welcome to collaborative team development.

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3. Capture wins & improvements against the goals regularly: Capture feedback in the moment. While you mark your progress against OKRs in Asana, share and celebrate wins and identify ways to improve for yourself and your teammates with OnLoop. Wins & improvements both are important aspects of growing a team. A hybrid world can result in team individuals with low work morale or lost directions while completing tasks. Real-time wins & improvements help keep the team members elevated with the celebration of their achievements and directions into their tasks. Additionally, with a seamless Slack integration, you can capture messages in Slack as wins and improvements. These captures would compound and feed the AI engine.

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4. Communicate real-time within the goal: Juggling between multiple platforms can be a task in itself and might take some time for context setting. OnLoop helps your team achieve better results by enabling you to communicate requirements/suggestions within that specific goal. This doesn’t let anyone lose sight of what the communication was about. 

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5. Have unified timelines of events captured in the project: With OnLoop you & your team have a unified timeline of milestones completed, wins & improvements captured against the goal to have a bird-eye view of events that happened in achieving the goal.

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6. Unleash the power of compounding feedback with AI-powered Prism summaries: OnLoop is built with the thought that feedback should be a regular habit and not a one-off quarterly/annual event. Also, it often happens that biases cloud the actual review of a person’s capabilities. Tackling this lesser-talked issue, OnLoop enables you to generate Prism summaries on the basis of wins and improvements captured by you to let your team members know how their performance was on a particular project highlighting their superpowers and blindspots. These summaries are based on the compounded captures that you make while working on a project. Don’t let the crucial feedback die as you complete the project.

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7. Upskill from personalized learning by OnLoop: In this time & age, anyone can learn anything which might lead to information overload. OnLoop takes care of this too. On the basis of summaries, it suggests learning content so that each individual has access to specific content in order to get better, faster. This helps in cutting down the clutter so that your team knows exactly what to consume in order to grow.

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See why other leaders are choosing OnLoop

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“OnLoop helps you write your story so others don't do it for you.”‍

Jarred Huggle, VP at BeyondMeat

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“OnLoop is proving to be monumentally important in kickstarting conversations that weren't happening. We're also seeing people start to reframe the negativity they associate with 'feedback' into something more positive, viewing it as 'guidance' that they are actively seeing out amongst their peers.”

Ailidh Smylie, MD at Socialize/We Are Social

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“Using OnLoop has helped us shine a light on our strengths by giving us visibility on the whole team’s areas for improvement and achievements. We’ve made leaps forward with our training program to better match our culture, empowering our team forward by owning our development”

Akanksha Goel, CEO at Socialize

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OnLoop is the much-needed change that will empower leaders with insights into their teams beyond OKRs.

Our approach to combine productivity & growth leads to a win-win situation for both managers and their employees in the hybrid world.

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