Make Objectives more collaborative

This article walks through examples of how account admins can configure various Objectives settings to make your OKR experience more collaborative. 

When should objectives be collaborative?

Many company-wide and department objectives require a collective effort. Some companies want managers to own department/group objectives and assign key results to various team members. Some companies veer towards creating individual objectives and aligning those objectives to department objectives, as opposed to creating a bunch of key results. At the end of the day and regardless of how you get there, objectives at your company are likely a culmination of many people's hard work- oftentimes work contributing towards the same few objectives.

Although the use cases vary, the underlying goal with "collaborative objectives" is to accurately display the teamwork happening behind the scenes. Let's talk about the different ways to make objectives collaborative in 15Five.

Create an objective for a group

When creating an objective, you have the option to create the objective for a person, a group, or the whole company. If you are creating an objective that will be worked on by various members of a group, choose 'a group' and find the group that applies. Although the objective still needs one specific owner, by selecting the type "group" you are specifying that the objective is a group effort. Typically, the objective owner will be the manager of the group. We also commonly see senior team members owning these department/group objectives.

When reporting on Objectives, you can filter by type>>>select any group and you will see all objectives that have been created for that group.

Align one objective with another

Aligning objectives is an essential part of the OKR methodology and collaborative objectives. If you've heard terms such as "parent" or "child" objective, you have heard about aligning objectives. In 15Five you have the option to align an objective with another objective. You can also choose whether the objective should impact the progress of the parent objective or not. Usually, individual objectives will align with department/group objectives, and department/group objectives will align with company-wide objectives. There are likely multiple child objectives per company-wide objective. When objectives are aligned, others in the company can easily see what their objectives mean for the bigger company picture, and leaders can easily see what things are being done to accomplish the company goals. 

Collaborative Objectives in 15Five= enabling teams to stay aligned and work together to drive company initiatives forward.

Add tags to an objective

If you're an account admin, you can enable and create tags for Objectives. Tags are a great way to organize objectives that may or may not already be related via alignment and/or team structure. Tagging objectives creates an overarching framework, divided up by topics or "tags". Adding another layer of organization to Objectives, they are ideal for companies that want to be able to easily see who is working on OKRs that are related to specific, shared themes.

Some ideas for tags are: Company-wide initiatives or themes (Culture, People, Revenue), Priority levels (P1, P2, P3), Stretch or Aspirational, and Company-wide KPIs (Decrease churn, Performance, PLG).

Assign key results to other people

This might be the most common way to show that an objective requires a collective effort. Regardless of who owns an objective, various people can own key results.

Why is this common? Teams use assigned key results to hold each team member accountable for their contributions to the department/squad/team objective. It is easy to track each team member's progress when they each have their own key result.

Teammates use assigned key results to show that some coworkers are helping them with a project. Staying in the loop on progress is much easier when you remember who you asked to help with which task. 

Allow everyone working on an objective to have editing access

For companies or teams who love transparency and equal ownership of objectives, the 'Who can edit and update this objective?' setting is ideal.

If the 'Who can edit and update this objective?' setting is enabled by an account admin, objective owners can allow editing access of their objective to anyone in the company. The option to allow editing will appear when anyone is creating an objective. The option also appears when editing an objective.

Why does this matter?

If changes need to be made to any field of an objective, other than overall or key result progress, the objective owner (and possibly their manager/hierarchy/admin) is the only person who can edit. If someone owns multiple objectives and each of those objectives has multiple key result owners, that's a lot of management. To lessen the editing burden, objective owners can allow others to edit certain objectives. All changes to an objective are logged in the 'Objective activity feed'. As the objective owner, you can check the feed regularly to make sure no one pulls a doozy. 

For example, let's say I'm leading a Refresh Project for the iOS app. I own an objective called "Refresh that iOS" and there are six key results owned by three different people. Assuming this setting is enabled, I would grant all key result owners full editing access to the objective when creating or editing the objective. After all, our company values transparency and equity, especially in Objectives. Now, each key result owner can make any needed changes without coming and asking me for help. And I can easily see what changes have been made by keeping my eye on the activity feed!