Setting and tracking strong goals will greatly boost employee engagement and motivation, inspiring everyone to do their best work. And establishing good goals begins with choosing a useful method of crafting them. By adopting the right goal-setting method, you’ll help each employee and team to craft goals that further your organizational mission. For these reasons, 82% of executives consider strategic goal-setting to be highly critical to organizational success.
OKRs and SMART goals can each serve as a useful goal-setting framework. Each provides a way of setting and driving toward clear, easily understandable goals. Whether you’re helping employees set professional development goals, establishing team goals, or setting high-level goals for the organization, using a clear framework will result in more focused and relevant objectives.
In this article, we’ll discuss the similarities of OKRs vs. SMART goals, as well as their key differences. Along the way, you’ll learn how to choose the right goal-setting framework for particular contexts. Let’s first examine the definitions for OKRs vs. SMART goals, before diving into how to use them both.
Table of Contents
- What Are OKRs?
- What Are SMART Goals?
- OKRs vs. Smart Goals: What Makes Them Different?
- When to Use OKRs vs. SMART Goals
- Tips for Setting Great OKRs and SMART Goals
- Tracking and Achieving Your Goals with Primalogik
What Are OKRs?
Let’s review a brief definition of OKRs, followed by concrete examples.
Definition
OKRs help you craft a specific objective that clearly connects to concrete outcomes. The OKR framework includes the following elements:
- Objectives: A clear, meaningful, and inspirational goal.
- Key results: Desired outcomes that will demonstrate achievement of this goal. Key results should be challenging yet achievable.
After creating OKRs, teams and individuals can plan projects and initiatives that support achievement of them, as Microsoft explains. This framework has existed since the 1970s and remains a popular method of setting goals. Its simplicity makes it easy to conceptualize and use. Plus, its effectiveness in designing shared goals boosts accountability.
As you set OKRs, ask yourself, “Are they meaningful? Audacious? Inspiring?” If the answer to any of these questions is “no,” push yourself to set goals that truly challenge and energize you.
OKR Examples
OKRs can relate to any area of business. Here is one example that pertains to online marketing.
Objective: Improve conversions of website visitors.
Key Results:
- Increase website visitors by 8% per month by producing quality biweekly content.
- Optimize landing pages and tailor website to mobile users.
- Grow conversions by 10% by the end of the quarter.
Here is another OKR example that relates to the HR function.
Objective: Improve the onboarding process, promoting retention of new hires.
Key Results:
- Increase satisfaction of new hires to 85% by providing engaging training and feedback.
- Hold at least two coaching conversations per week with each new hire.
- Pair each new hire with a mentor and peer buddy, who meet with them on a weekly basis.
As you can see, the objectives here are broad and adaptable, while the key results are highly specific. Now, let’s turn to SMART goals and how they differ from OKRs.
What Are SMART Goals?
The SMART goal framework has also been used in management for decades, having been introduced in 1981. Let’s now examine what constitutes a SMART goal, along with a couple of examples.
Definition
A SMART goal typically has one clear target, while an OKR can have several.
A SMART goal is all of the following:
- Specific: Clear and well-defined.
- Measurable: Including specific criteria that illustrate success.
- Achievable: Challenging but feasible for you to accomplish.
- Relevant: Aligned with your mission, values, and strategic goals.
- Time-bound: Has a clear target date.
To recap, a well-designed SMART goal has clear metrics of success and pushes you to stretch your abilities. It also has a clear time-frame, and its high level of relevance to your mission makes it meaningful to you and your team. Further, the target result of a SMART goal is incorporated into the goal statement, whereas with OKRs, multiple targets follow the stated goal.
SMART Goal Examples
Like OKRs, SMART goals can pertain to any function. For instance, an accounting professional might set a goal like this one:
- Produce a monthly budget report that highlights areas where we can reduce spending, to bring expenses back in budget.
Here are a few more examples of SMART goals:
- Strengthen customer satisfaction by 40% by the end of the quarter.
- Increase sales by 10% in December by promoting our two new product offerings.
- Boost social media engagement by 25% by producing a 3-month content calendar highlighting upcoming events, product launches, and other timely information.
These goals have a clear objective and a high level of relevance. Plus, they’re specific enough to measure success using the criteria stated here.
OKRs vs. Smart Goals: What Makes Them Different?
Let’s look at how OKRs and SMART goals differ, so you can understand how to use them both.
Structure and Approach
The framework for crafting OKRs focuses on identifying specific outcomes that define success. Additionally, you’ll typically have more than one key result for any given objective when creating OKRs.
At the same time, after writing SMART goals, you should pinpoint metrics for success. Or, if you’re helping employees set SMART goals, discuss key results for each goal with them. Write down these desired outcomes for future reference.
Further, OKRs are easy to adapt—if you’re quickly moving toward a target, you can simply increase the numbers or percentages listed in your key results. The stated objective is typically simple and straightforward; it will usually remain relevant if you modify the targets (unless priorities have changed or you’ve achieved the goal). In other words, the OKR framework makes it easy to keep the same goal but shift the targets, in this situation. So, they tend to work well for longer-term goals, providing flexibility as organizational priorities shift.
Additionally, different people or teams could hold responsibility for individual key results that fall under an OKR. So, OKRs can be helpful for creating shared team or organization-wide goals that unify people’s efforts.
Can OKRS Be SMART?
Absolutely—OKRs can meet all of the SMART criteria. In fact, they should. Likewise, SMART goals can—and should—have clear objectives and key results associated with them. Each framework provides a different way of approaching goal design, but they produce a similar outcome.
When to Use OKRs vs. SMART Goals
How can you know when to use OKRs vs. SMART goals?
Each framework can work well in different situations. Because OKRs are so easily adaptable, they work well in fast-paced business environments that demand agile thinking. Teams can easily grasp changes made to OKRs. And OKRs can help streamline cascading goals, since they’re concise and results-oriented. A larger team can share one overarching objective, with smaller groups or individuals taking responsibility for specific key results. So, OKRs are extremely useful for big-picture strategic goals.
Meanwhile, the SMART goal-setting method proves valuable for short-term and individual goal-setting efforts. You can use the SMART goal framework to craft personal development objectives, for instance. Each goal will be highly specific and relevant to your needs (or the needs of your employee). You can also use the SMART method for setting monthly performance goals.
Or, you can use a blend of both frameworks to guide your goal-setting efforts. As mentioned above, you can set OKRs that are SMART. After setting SMART objectives, you can define the results you’re targeting, which allows you to benefit from both frameworks. Likewise, you can detail key results for your SMART goals, to serve as metrics for success.
Tips for Setting Great OKRs and SMART Goals
Use these strategies in setting either type of goal.
- Brainstorm on different pathways to the desired end result. When setting team goals, discuss this as a group; if helping an employee set goals, discuss it one-on-one. You might come up with creative ways of moving toward a goal more effectively.
- Make each objective a stretch goal. If it’s not a learning experience, it’s not pushing you (or your employees) to grow. A good OKR (or SMART goal) is realized through behaviour changes that make an employee more effective, says Jeff Gothelf in Harvard Business Review. Without that element, you’re missing an opportunity for growth.
- Ensure that each key result, or metric of success, is a genuine accomplishment and not just a completed task. Key results aren’t just actions taken—they’re achievements reached.
- Create a timeline for each objective, with target dates for “mini-milestones.”
- Recalibrate goals periodically to keep them relevant. Reflect on them once per month, or after any higher-level strategic changes.
Next, let’s explore how to track goals effectively.
Tracking and Achieving Your Goals with Primalogik
Primalogik’s goal-tracking software allows you to create, input, and track SMART goals and OKRs for both individuals and teams. On a daily basis, you can use this software to monitor progress and pinpoint hurdles to goal achievement. Because you’ll have clear metrics for your goals, you can track the percentage you’ve reached to date. For example, if you’ve reached 35% of a goal for the quarter within the first month, you’ll know you’re right on track.
These tools can play a crucial role in continuous performance management, helping you share specific and timely feedback. Each employee will also be able to refer to their own progress via a user-friendly dashboard, boosting motivation and keeping them driven to achieve their goals.
Further, goal-tracking tools can inform your performance reviews, highlighting key struggles and achievements. Managers can provide more accurate appraisals with the help of these solutions.
These tools will also help you track cascading goals, managing the objectives of individuals, teams, and the organization as a whole. You can track goals across various departments, taking note of any hurdles and discussing how to overcome them in team meetings and one-on-ones.
By this point, you have a solid understanding of when and how to use OKRs vs. SMART goals. Now, you can guide employees in using each framework in the right contexts. By introducing them to these methods of goal-setting, you’ll ensure that each individual and team is moving toward strong and relevant objectives. Taking these steps can have a dramatic influence on organizational success by keeping everyone’s efforts centred on your overarching mission and vision.
Learn how Primalogik’s software solutions will support your teams’ goal-achievement—demo our performance management solution!
