5 ways to free yourself from the administrative overhead of OKR

Key takeaway: To minimize the administrative burden of OKRs, focus on team-level Objectives, eliminate approval processes, conduct concise weekly check-ins, simplify alignment, and don't force every team to have OKRs. This approach simplifies goal management, enhances efficiency, and maintains the flexibility and effectiveness of the OKR framework.

OKR has become detached from its roots.

It was designed to be a lightweight, flexible approach to managing goals across an organization. Managing goals is fairly easy when you’re just a few people, but quickly becomes more complex as an organization grows.

Today, OKR still is the best available solution. However, hundreds of books and legions of consultants haven’t done the framework much good.

Organizations should rethink their approach to OKR to get a better balance between added value and administrative overhead.

Here are 5 ways to minimize the administrative overhead of OKR, while maintaining the value-add.

1. Avoid individual OKRs

OKRs have to be created, updated, and closed. Doing so at company- and team-level is already time consuming enough. Having to do this also for each and every individual that works at your company blows up the administrative overhead.

Much better to have an entire team focus on a few impactful OKRs than to have each and every team member work on two or three small-scale Objectives.

When setting OKRs, instead of going around the table asking everyone what his or her OKRs will be, ask what are the biggest problems that your team should solve next. Then decide who should be contributing to it. First what, then who.

2. Skip approval flows

Approval flows for OKRs might seem like a way to ensure quality and alignment — but they actually slow everything down and erode trust. 

Approval processes add unnecessary delays, especially in fast-moving environments. Leaders can take days or weeks to review and approve OKRs. Teams should focus on execution, not waiting for sign-offs.

Requiring approval also signals a lack of trust in your teams to set the right goals. 

Instead of approvals, invest in a razor-sharp company strategy and crystal-clear company OKRs for the year. That’s what teams need to identify the right OKRs for themselves.

It’s also worth reading Christina Wodtke’s take on this -> https://eleganthack.com/decoupling-okrs-its-time-to-let-go

3. Weekly Check-ins

Some organizations require frequent updates and/or overly detailed progress tracking. This turns OKR into a chore rather than a strategy execution tool.

OKRs don’t have to be updated and reviewed every day or every hour. Once a week is sufficient to maintain focus and accountability. 

Establish a simple rhythm for weekly Check-ins, in which team members update and review progress for their goals (OKRs and KPIs).

Let them provide context where necessary.

Progress can be reviewed by the manager or team asynchronously.

Shouldn’t take more than 5-10 minutes per week. That’s it.

4. Alignment doesn’t have to be perfect

Aligning your OKRs answers the question “Why are we working on this?”. What’s the higher purpose? 

It’s a simple way to ensure that the OKR provides value to the business. 

Aligning an OKR to more than one business goal might seem like a good way to cover all bases — but, in practice, it’s counterproductive and often downright ridiculous. 

Avoid drawing up all the possible correlations between your OKRs and other business goals. Lots of stuff that you work on has some effect on multiple other things. What a nightmare it will be if everyone is trying to map all these effects every time they set OKR. 

Keep it simple. Align your OKR to what’s most applicable.

If you can’t, your OKR is too broad and unfocused.

As a reminder, an OKR can support:
- Another OKR (eg. a quarterly team OKR supporting an annual company OKR).
- A KPI (ie. an OKR focused on turning an unhealthy KPI healthy again).
- A Strategic Pillar (ie. an OKR directly supporting the company strategy).

5. Not every team needs OKRs all the time

It’s perfectly fine for a team to not have any OKRs at specific points in time. Don’t force every team to participate with OKRs all the time.

OKRs are change goals — best suited for driving focus on what needs to change or improve in a given timeframe.

Teams working on stable, well-functioning areas or ongoing tasks (e.g., payroll, compliance) will see most of their work tracked through KPIs or standard performance metrics. For them, having OKRs could be an exception rather than the rule.

There may also be teams that, by nature, contribute to OKRs mostly through Initiatives:
- The Objective tells you where to go.
- Key Results are the results that you need to achieve your Objectives.
- Initiatives are all the projects and tasks that teams and people work on to achieve those Key Results.

Setting OKRs for every team — even when there’s no pressing need — creates unnecessary work. Teams will end up creating “artificial OKRs” that lack real value, just to comply with the system. This defeats the purpose of OKRs, which is to identify priorities and deliver them.

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More generally, just don’t overcomplicate things.

Remove any practice or rule that doesn’t have a clear value-add.  

Adding complexity is easy; removing complexity is a lot harder.