Speaker 1: The process of OKR alignment is meant to unify your company and team, so everyone knows what's going on, and how everyone contributes to the company's largest goals. It's one of the most critical aspects of objectives and key results methodology, but can also be tricky to get started with. To help you in your OKR journey, this video will go over the basics of alignment, help you find a style of alignment that best works for you, and also run you through the process of aligning objectives. Before you start aligning your objectives, it's probably best to have a quick refresher on OKR methodology. Basically, OKRs serve as a goal-setting strategy. The O stands for Objectives, which are the aspirational goals you want to achieve to move your company or team forward. The KR then stands for Key Results. Key Results are the measurable outcomes that help you measure progress towards your objectives. From there, your weekly tasks, plans, and projects help drive your objectives forward. Before you start coming up with OKRs, you need to think about the structure of alignment you want to create. OKRs can be set at the company, team, and personal levels. When you are just starting out, try and keep things as simple as possible, and start with just company and team levels only. You can introduce personal OKRs when everyone is already comfortable with the concept and understands how they work. For bigger companies, you might even try to create departmental OKRs, which define priorities for a group of teams, but you should use them only if you need to create that extra level. So now that you understand OKR levels, it's time to talk about aligning them. The purpose of OKR alignment is to unify your company and make sure everyone knows what they're doing and how their work contributes to the company's larger goals. Often, you'll hear about alignment mixed with terms such as cascading, which refers to alignment from a top-down approach, or linking, which is the practical process of numerically connecting objectives at different level. Linking is a part of the alignment process, but isn't necessary. We'll go over linking more in a separate video. You can align your company in two ways. Either you can do it top-down, where objectives are assigned from high-level leaders and executives downwards, or bottom-up, where employees are asked to come up with their own suggestions for their quarterly goals. We recommend being versatile and doing a little of both, where your management or CEO outlines the company OKRs first. From there, your team manager should be asked to come up with their own team goals, based on how they plan to contribute to the company objective. Then, team managers should meet and discuss both team and company goals with employees and either assign personal goals, or have people come up with their own. At each stage, it is important to come together and iterate on them, add, delete, and modify your OKRs. As a reminder, you should try and limit yourself to 1-3 objectives, and 3-5 key results at each level. This helps make sure you stay focused on what matters. Now that you have a better idea of how OKR alignment works, let's run through an example of what the process looks like in a company. The beginning of the quarter should start with upper management coming up with a few goals that they would like to set for the quarter. Let's say the company's big goals are to increase revenue and improve the quality of staff. If upper management has a clear idea of how they would like to achieve the goals, then they can come up with their own key results. From there, they can assign those key results as objectives, for each team using a traditional top-down or cascading approach. However, in this case, it'd be nice if teams got a say in the direction management went with the company goals. They work closer with the clientele, and therefore have more experience with the day-to-day changes necessary to make larger objectives happen. So instead, higher management would meet with team leaders, and inform them about the general direction they'd like to go. For this example, let's look at two teams, marketing and HR. Each team would plan out how they contribute to the two company goals. In this case, the marketing team would come up with a way to increase revenue, by offering special summer packages for a limited time. The HR team, on the other hand, will hire two new staff members. From there, the team leaders meet with the individuals below them, and discuss both the company and team goals. This is a good opportunity to collect feedback on the company direction. Marketing this time came up with two objectives. One, promote and distribute summer package event deal on all social media networks. And two, create a video advertisement promotion for YouTube. HR came up with two goals of their own as well. First, interview the top five candidates for the new position. And two, read through all application submissions to find the most suitable candidates. After these goals are set, everyone can add additional objectives below them, eliminate anything they feel isn't beneficial, and tweak the OKRs they already have. Aligning objectives helps your company accomplish their large objectives quickly, by showing everyone the smaller parts that drive them. Not to mention, aligning objectives helps people see what needs to be improved on all levels, and it encourages creative solutions to larger problems. Aligning your objectives is an important part of the OKR process. So why not streamline it with Weekdone? Weekdone offers quick and easy automated linking and alignment, so you can see how your OKRs align. So sign up and try it out.