1. Connect company objectives to your team
With the company-wide goals in mind, consider how your team can contribute to them.
The department’s manager may work on a rough draft on their own, but it’s a best practice to finish creating team goals with contributions from all team members.
At this stage, aim to have a longer list of ways your team could support top-level objectives. Although your initiatives should be quantifiable, this isn’t yet the time to set a number.
2. Define 3–5 team goals for the quarter
Schedule a brainstorming session with your team to define objectives to support the business goals. The OKR methodology recommends 3 to 5 objectives per quarter.
Learn all about setting the right objectives and key results here.
3. Break the objectives into measurable, impactful key results
Remember: Objectives are what you want to achieve, and key results are the milestones you’ll pass on the way there.
Suppose one of your objectives, as the marketing team of Mars Marmalades in Q2, is to grow brand awareness in specific markets. In that case, key results could involve:
- Launching X new campaigns;
- Increasing organic traffic in those markets by Y%;
- Hiring Z chefs as brand ambassadors.
Check out this example of company goals (also at Mars Marmalades) for a different quarter and contributions (key results) from various teams:
See what a few of the great departments at Mars Marmalades are planning as key results for Q3 to support the company-wide goals:
Food Engineering
- Conduct consumer trend research and interview 250 consumers to identify top 3 trends and preferences (first month of Q3);
- Develop 7 new flavors (first month of Q3);
- Launch focus group and conduct field research with the 7 new flavors (month 2);
- Refine the 3 chosen flavors for launch (month 2).
Industrial Engineering
- Hire 17 new team members to cater to the increased production (until the end of month 2);
- Increase capacity at our production facility by 15% (until the end of month 2);
- Identify and obtain 3 new pieces of machinery needed for the new flavors (until the end of month 2).
Marketing
- Launch two social media channels and generate a following of 3,000;
- Launch an offline marketing campaign that generated 500 new customers;
- 75% of the customer feedback after conducting a brand activation campaign suggests a positive image of Mars Marmalades
Sales
- Pitch the product to 2,688 new potential distributors;
- Expand distribution network to South America and South Asia (at least 20 distributors in each of these markets).
4. Assign individual ownership
Each team member should be responsible for ensuring specific key results are reached. Team goals are all about showing employees that what they do matters, so give them the space to pitch initiatives and share which ones they would want to take ownership for.
Follow-up best practices for setting team goals that align with your company’s objectives
Support your team and track progress
You can support your reports in many ways. Give them the resources they need to complete their tasks and offer help throughout the quarter. In some cases, you may also choose to create an action plan with individual contributors.
Having a recurrent OKR check-in meeting is a best practice for “crushing” your department’s OKRs (and yes, we also have step-by-step instructions for that!). And the best way to keep track of progress is to use a holistic people enablement and alignment platform with advanced OKR software like Leapsome.
Besides running OKR check-in meetings and transparently tracking progress with a tool for goals and OKRs, discuss the progress of individual initiatives in 1:1 meetings and provide regular feedback.
💡 Would you like to know more about achieving company and team goals? Download the ultimate guide to OKRs. 😉
Create more company alignment with Leapsome
Leapsome is the only platform that closes the loop between performance management, employee engagement, and learning.
A goal tree can help you define cascading goals that align with your company’s objectives. Watch this video to learn more about Leapsome’s Goal Tree feature and how it can help you visualize and structure goals within your organization.