Scoring OKRs
Scoring (also called grading) OKRs is when organizations analyze their performance against their defined Objectives and Key Results. This typically occurs at the end of an execution cycle. Scoring OKRs is an important part of the process, because it is when teams are able to objectively measure how they did compared to what they planned to do.
There are several methods available for scoring OKRs. They range from a simple “yes / no” method of scoring to more quantified methods.
The yes / no scoring method works as it sounds. For each of your Objectives and Key Results, you would answer the question, “Did we achieve this?” with a yes or no response.
Using our “improve online customer experience” example above:
| | Did we achieve this? |
---|
Objective | Improve online customer experience within the next 6 months | Yes – achieved all three of our Key Results to improve customer experience during this six-month period |
Key Result 1 | Add live chat bot to website to reduce online support calls by 15% | Yes – reduced online support calls by 26% |
Key Result 2 | Increase conversion rate of website visitors to trial by 20% | Yes – increased conversion rate to 22.5% |
Key Result 3 | Conduct three focus groups to better understand online customer pain points | Yes – three focus groups were conducted |
The yes / no scoring method can be helpful for Objectives that are truly either / or: Either you achieved them, or you did not. For example, if your Objective was to launch a new product line in Q1, but you were not able to do so, then this scoring method would work.
However, most organizations choose to use scoring methods that tell a more complete story of the progress made on OKRs, such as by scoring each Key Result on a scale from 0.0 to 1.0. Using this scoring method, each Key Result would be graded, and the average score of all Key Results would be used to measure the overall score of the Objective.
With this approach, a “1.0” is intended to be a stretch goal and most results should land in the range of 0.6 – 0.7. From the Google official site on using OKRs, ReWork:
“The sweet spot for OKRs is somewhere in the 60-70% range. Scoring lower may mean the
organization is not achieving enough of what it could be. Scoring higher may mean the aspirational
goals are not being set high enough. With Google’s 0.0 – 1.0 scale, the expectation is to get an
average of 0.6 to 0.7 across all OKRs. For organizations who are new to OKRs, this tolerance for
‘failure’ to hit the uncomfortable goals is itself uncomfortable.”