24 Excellent HR OKR Examples to set your team up for success!
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With a tumultuous job market and rapidly changing employee expectations, HR teams are overwhelmed by the sheer quantum of strategic initiatives that must execute along with the daily operational activities.
HR professionals can lose focus without a clear understanding of the goals and an ability to measure progress continuously. A modern approach to managing this is using OKRs- Objectives and Key Results.
Let’s delve into what HR OKRs mean, how to create OKRs, and see OKR examples of every HR function:
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are components of a robust goal-setting framework that allows tracking performance measurably.
24 Excellent HR OKR Examples to set your team up for success! 1
The Objectives (O) define what you want to achieve. These are aspirational, qualitative goals. In the context of the Human Resources (HR) function, these objectives would relate to improving the various HR aspects across the employee lifecycle, such as recruitment, training, payroll, engagement, and more.
Each objective has multiple Key Results (KRs), which are measurable business outcomes to track your progress towards your objective. Each KR contains a metric and a target value to be achieved for that metric within a specific timeframe.
Setting OKRs helps you to define the HR initiatives, projects, or tasks that would help attain the key results.
Per Gartner’s research, a combination of factors such as digital transformation, remote teams, adoption of agile methods, and availability of OKR software is driving the adoption of the OKR framework across organisations.
How To Write HR OKRs?
OKRs must be in alignment with the overall strategic objectives of your organisation. The organisational level goals must cascade down to each department and sub-department in the form of OKRs.
The following are some crucial points for formulating OKRs for your HR department.
The key results (KRs) must be specific and measurable in objective terms.
Each OKR must be time-bound. Typically, the timeframe for an excellent HR OKR is three months.
A Deloitte study shows that high-performing organisations are 3.1 times more likely to update goals at least quarterly.
Each objective must have a reasonable number of critical results. Typically, 2 to 5 key results per objective are optimum. Having more than five keys results in a loss of focus.
The visibility of each KR should be clearly defined. For example, vital strategic results can be visible across the organisation to ensure transparency.
Some organisations assign a weighted value to each critical development to determine the priority among the key results.
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HR OKR Examples
Below are some HR OKR examples covering different facets of the HR function. For the sake of simplicity, the period and visibility for each KR are not mentioned separately in the examples, as these parameters are organisation-specific.
Create 2 new Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) for underrepresented communities
Key Result 2
Ensure completion of DE&I training for all new hires within 3 weeks of joining
Key Result 3
Ensure investigation of all DE&I-related complaints within 2 days of raising the complaint
Key Result 4
Decrease the width of pay bands at each level by 50%
#11. OKRs for Talent Management
Objective 23
Reduce Leadership Talent risk
Key Result 1
Enrol 10 new candidates (senior manager and above) in the leadership development program
Key Result 2
Create a succession planning report covering at least 70% of managers
Key Result 3
Reduce attrition at the top management level (senior manager and above) by 5%
Objective 24
Implement an internship program to build a talent pipeline
Key Result 1
Recruit 5 paid interns for 3-month internships across functions
Key Result 2
Design two online training courses for interns
Key Result 3
Create an evaluation framework and an offer policy for interns based on manager recommendations
Closing Words
As per Mckinsey’s research, an agile transformation can increase employee engagement by 20 to 30% and improve operational performance metrics by 30 to 50%.
OKRs are crucial to HR agility. An agile transformation requires enhanced visibility and understanding of objectives, direct ownership, and real-time accountability. It is precisely what OKRs enable.
Sukriti Saini works as a content marketing strategist at HROne. She has done Bachelors in Journalism from Delhi University and carries several years of experience in content development. HR trends, Productivity, Performance and topics related to Employee Engagement garner most of her writing interest here. During leisure, she loves to write and talk about fashion, food & life.