How We Use Weekdone To Solve Your OKR Woes

okr performance management system

OKR as a useful framework to replace legacy PMS was covered in the previous post in this series. The post also talked about how we implemented it and our takeaways so far. Weekdone is an immersive new OKR Tool that we have been using for a while to track the goals of the company. But do you know how to use weekdone and learn more about OKR performance management system.

Fast forward today amid COVID crisis, when we are all working from our confinements, either at home or locked up somewhere we don’t want to be, OKRs seem more powerful than ever to keep us all on track. Interestingly, a lot of caveats have surfaced in the remote setup. That along with the need to adopt the new normal got us hunting for a tool that could-

  1. Align objectives across teams more seamlessly and automate tracking to a large extent
  2. Allow us to plan tasks regularly in line with the set objectives

Choosing Weekdone As OKR Performance Management System

Unfortunately, there are very few tools in the market that fit the above goals. And among the ones that do, they lack the basic feature of aligning team/individual goals to company goals. We finally settled with an OKR tool called Weekdone. It checked all the boxes for us in terms of planning quarterly objectives at the company and team levels, aligning objectives across levels, planning weekly tasks as initiatives of the set objectives, and tracking the same with complete visibility across the org. It has an intuitive drag-and-drop style interface that makes all the planning and tracking super quick. There’s also an option to represent these objectives and weekly plans across teams in a hierarchical tree structure for easy unification of top-down and bottom-up approaches as discussed in my last post. Let’s discuss how to use weekdone.

Here’s a snapshot of the quarterly objectives dashboard.

2

As you’d notice in the above snapshot, you could add as many teams as you like to facilitate team-level planning and tracking of objectives, aligned with the overall company goals. 

When defining objectives, Weekdone does not let you err and does a beautiful job of keeping your OKR implementation on track. It has a multitude of metrics that you could measure your key results on ranging from $ value to % progress. It also allows you to customize your measurement type to a boolean (0 or 1) which we usually do for some aggressive key results where we can’t settle for an “almost done” state. Let’s understand how to use weekdone.

Weekly Planning On Weekdone – OKR performance management system

Weekdone as a tool is designed around the basic concept of OKRs. But it further allows breaking down of these objectives into what it calls, PPP- Plans and Progress. It contains an array of templates to reconfigure from PPP into something like Upcoming week, Last week, Urgent and Backlog, which we have done for our product team. Similarly, we’ve configured our Sales planning to have the below template, where sales performance can be recorded.

3

Every week, each team marks progress on last week’s tasks and might add progress to the key results that these tasks were related to. Later, they also plan their next week’s tasks in their team-specific template which could be PPP or any other planning norm that suits them. 

Weekdone also lets you send weekly digests to the stakeholders. You can define who all these reports should go to and what they should consist of. It has a nice little Newsfeed feature too that records the activity of your team members when they make edits. But what takes the cake is the TV feature which is a leaderboard of sorts of how objectives are progressing.

Other features that we don’t currently use but might get to soon-

  1. Individual OKRs- for companies that have implemented OKRs down to an individual level
  2. 1:1 meetings- a good feature to record 1:1 discussions based on OKRs especially individual OKRs  
  3. External applications and API- there are a bunch of applications that can integrate with Weekdone, along with a REST-based API that can come in handy if you’d like a custom configuration

Current Challenges with OKR Management

Weekdone has helped us move a step ahead in our OKR performance management system implementation journey. This is the second quarter of planning and tracking, but there are still challenges- 

  1. Tool adoption remains the number one challenge. People still use the tool only days before the scheduled discussion on OKRs. Constant reminders help only so much, and there’s a need for a cultural transformation that embeds “OKRs on Weekdone”.
  2. At times, individual responsibilities (KRAs as covered in the previous post) seem at odds with the rest of the OKRs, especially because OKR performance management system change every quarter, and KRAs remain static. We realize the need to readapt to the dynamics of an aligned culture. Since salary hikes and bonuses are deeply coupled with the OKR progress, it’s even more important to explore the alignment further, probably in the form of moving to individual OKRs. Whenever we take that route, I’ll cover that in another post.

In Conclusion

Hopefully, you know how to use weekdone to track your OKRs. Level of flexibility in planning, multiple ways to measure key results. Ability to send reports to the concerned team members. And the complete unification of the OKR framework in one place is what makes Weekdone work for us. A word of caution though- What gets planned gets done. This means planning is important to tick off your tasks. But the corollary that only so much that gets planned will get done. Essentially, everything rolls back to what kind of norms you have set to work for your organization’s scale. 

How have you implemented OKRs in your company? Tell us in the comments. 

Share :

Related Posts

Newsletter Signup