Negotiate a raise using OKRs and Tability

If your leaders don’t do a good job explaining why they’re rolling out OKRs, it can be hard to see them as a useful tool. Instead of communicating how they can help everyone in the organisation do better, OKRs end up feeling like an additional metric or a new way to be micromanaged.

But doing OKRs well can give you one of the most useful tools to not only getting your manager to give you some breathing room, but also to negotiating a better raise come review time– a paper trail on the outcomes you achieved and the work that you’ve done.

Salary reviews need data. According to Harvard Business Review, some top tips for preparing for a salary negotiation is to document success and come with a “brag sheet,” a summary that shows how valuable you are.

Instead of scrambling during your performance review for examples of a time you went above and beyond, take some time each week to show your boss what you’ve achieved.

Focus on what’s most important

Your team sets OKRs based on what’s most critical that quarter. Each key result metric represents an area where big change or committed focus is important. Which means that when you own one of those key results, you can explicitly state that it’s your efforts that helped drive success towards key business goals.

You don’t need to guess what your manager or leaders will find important– they’ve already shown you what it is and given you the reins. Coming back to these key results to talk about your work on them is a no-brainer at your performance reviews, and ensuring that you’ve put effort into them will go a long way toward building your case for a raise.

Keep notes as you go

In Tability, you update your key results through check-ins, a regular update of your progress and your confidence in being able to meet your goal.

Every time you do your check-in, you have an opportunity to highlight your successes and also any blockers that are holding you back. This is a perfect place to document your wins and ensure that you are asking for the things that you need to be successful. Need something from your manager? Put it in your check-in to make sure you’re documenting that you’ve asked for it on a certain date (make sure to @ mention them so they see it!). Saw great results from something you did? Put it in your check-in alongside how you expect to continue to see success.

Interested in a quick template for capturing this in a check-in? Try using this:

Last week we [what projects or work did you do towards your goals?].

This moved our metrics from ____ to _____, which is [what we hoped for/just OK/not what we wanted].

Next week, we’re going to [projects or work that you plan on doing], which should [keep or accelerate our momentum/get us back on track].

I need ___________ in order to succeed this week.

Beyond check-ins, end of quarter retrospectives also give you the opportunity to highlight your accomplishments. Retrospectives give you more of an opportunity to craft a narrative around your work and highlight not just your successes, but what you overcame as well.

This quarter, we went from _____ to _____, which was XX% of our goal. While working on this key result, we [list accomplishments like projects completed, milestones achieved, and metric advancements]. In order to see that success, we had to overcome [list hurdles and blockers that slowed or prevented momentum]. In order to do so, we [list the actions that were taken].

In the future, we plan to [what will you start doing to improve your work on your key results]. We’ll no longer [what didn’t work well? What will you avoid next quarter]. And we’ll build on our progress by continuing to [what went well that you’ll keep doing?].

This highlights your wins, shows how you can use the tools at your disposal (and work with other teams), and that you’re continuing to see areas to improve– but lets you phrase them in a way that is growth focused as opposed to fixing poor performance.

Create your brag sheet:

In the OKR cycle, it can be easy to finish one quarter and quickly move on to the next. But if you want to use your OKR data to land that raise, you’ll want to come up with some collateral to present at your meeting. You’ve given yourself plenty of data, but presenting that data in a concise way is just as important. It’s time to create your brag sheet:

Create a document you can track the following on between each review cycle:

• 2-3 key results you owned or directly influenced for each quarter. Don’t include everything you’ve worked on (you don’t want to overwhelm your manager), just the highest impact goals where you’ve had the most success.

• Note those key results’ business impact. For some key results (like with revenue), the impact is obvious. For others, look at what those key results were linked to. If you were working on a product backlog, for example, don’t just say that the backlog is smaller– point to the new products that launched or the improved product performance. Look at your company’s top-level OKRs for guidance and figure out how the key results you’re talking about impacted those critical targets.

• Highlight patterns in your OKR performance. Where did you work with other teams for each key result? How did you show leadership? When did you escalate issues? The goal is to show that you aren’t getting lucky with your OKRs– you’re consistently doing the best work.

• Connect your impact to your ask. If your OKR impact is directly improving company metrics, ask for your compensation to reflect the impact of your contribution. If the way you worked on your key results demonstrated proficiencies for a higher role, outline what you did and connect it to the competencies for that other position (i.e. “Given I project managed X people across Y teams and reported my progress directly to leadership, I would like to discuss moving into a role where those skills can be utilized.”)

Start with your OKRs

OKRs aren’t just a planning tool– they’re one of the best ways to make your work visible and defensible. Publicly tracking your progress through your check-ins, reflecting honestly at the end of the quarter, and connecting your work with your company’s goals are the core pillars of Tability, and you can use these pillars to showcase your work and have a successful negotiation.

So next time performance reviews roll around, don’t scramble to remember what you accomplished. Look at your OKRs, pull out the story you’ve already been writing all quarter, and use that to advocate for the compensation you deserve.