Adding more teams to your OKR process

Starting your OKR journey with a single team or department is a great way to build your process and find what works best for you. But with only one team working in a formal tool, it risks creating a silo with slower execution as other teams await reports to know what your team’s priorities are so they can help out. A full adoption of OKRs, and ensuring that everyone who needs to be in the know has access to the same data, can help unlock real alignment and transparency, and help your organization execute faster on your top priorities. But how do you approach rolling OKRs and tools like Tability throughout your organization? We’ve got you covered.

Why expand beyond leadership?

We suggest that teams that are brand new to OKRs just start with their leadership. Not only does this make a simpler initial rollout, but it also helps set an example for teams to follow later. But beyond “the execs do it,” explaining why your team should care is critical to ensuring they stay engaged with the process. So before giving the directive to start writing goals, talk to your team about the top-level OKRs in your organization and make sure they understand that their work will directly impact those goals, and that their team OKRs just help make sure they’re working in the same direction. This makes sure that everyone has the “why” behind their work.

This also gives teams a place to work collaboratively towards common goals. By having multiple teams in your workspace, it’s clear what the top priorities are, and what kind of bandwidth everyone has. No only will teams be able to understand what each others’ priorities are, but they’ll also be able to make decisions faster with less time waiting to hear back from others on what they can make happen.

What is different with multiple teams?

It may be tempting to see a broader rollout and think that you can force all of your teams into alignment with a top-down approach to your OKRs– the company key results become the departmental objectives, whose key results become the team objectives, and so on. But this often creates a clunky, slow process that spends up to a ⅓ of the quarter just on planning.

Instead, focus on a bottom up or mult-directional approach to goal setting. Publish your top-level company goals and allow teams to set their own, aligned OKRs. After they’ve been published, have teams look at other teams’ goals and find overlap where they can work together, duplicate goals that can be deduplicated, or misaligned goals where teams would be going in opposite directions. Let them connect their goals as dependencies or related key results or go back to their OKR draft to make adjustments as needed (for instance, if the product team is launching a major new product as is tracking how many users try it out, the Sales team should have some goal around getting new customers on the new product, the Customer Success team should be included in the goal (and focused on getting existing customers to try the new product), and the marketing team can focus on using the new product in their campaign).

What stays the same, however, is the reporting process. Teams will still give the same updates that your organization has been doing already, keeping their goals up to date, but they’ll likely use more @ mentions and comments than you had been using with a single set of OKRs. These conversations are what drives better alignment, so leadership should both encourage and interact with them. Even a simple thumbs up to a question that is asked and answered can help foster those interactions.

Reporting at scale

With more OKRs comes more data and knowing where to spend your time to keep your strategy moving forward is important. As you roll out OKRs to more of your team, you’ll want to make sure you have someone who is dedicated to monitoring the process to ensure that goals are updated and that anything that needs attention gets the resources it needs or gets deprioritized.

Tability has rich filters you can use to monitor all of your key results across the entire workspace. We’ve put together a guide to help you build the best dashboard for keeping a broader team engaged. Check it out here.

Connecting your goals and monitoring for issues lets you see if there’s anything downstream that might cause your top-level OKRs to be missed and to make changes or move resources as needed so that the entire organization stays on track.

Not ready to roll out to the entire organization?

If you’ve only just gotten started, moving to a T-shaped implementation can be a good next step. Here, you’ll include your leadership team (which gives you representation across the entire organization), and then a full department (a deep rollout in just one function). This still gives you more visibility into what’s connected to your goals and allows you to build out processes when there are more layers of OKRs.

If you’re ready to move forward, before your roll out, you’ll want to find a handful of OKR champions. There are team members from across the organization who become knowledgeable about the OKR process so that they can be a go-to resources for others in the organization about how to approach OKRs. This ensures that your team doesn’t feel blocked because they can’t ask questions– there are more people who can help answer anything from how many goals to create to what comes next in the process.

Regardless of which way you go, keep your goals simple and measurable at the team level. A single, well crafted OKR with just 3 key results is better than a bloated plan filled with key results that are more output focused (A key result focused on increasing active users is better than a key result about putting together a new dashboard to track how many active users you have).

Take the next step

Rolling out OKRs across your entire organization isn’t just a process upgrade—it’s a growth strategy. When every team is aligned to the same objectives, you reduce silos, accelerate decision-making, and ensure that all efforts contribute to the bigger picture. The result? More focus, better execution, and faster progress toward your goals.

If you’re ready to take the next step and expand OKRs beyond a single team, book a strategy session with our team today—we’ll help you plan a smooth rollout that drives alignment and results.

Want to do some more reading about rolling out your OKR process? Check out our implementation guide.