Conversations, Feedback and Recognition (CFRs) are a core building block to an effective OKR (Objective and Key Result) solution.
As a quick reminder, in Measure What Matters John Doerr defines CFR as follows:
In the normal flow of business, CFRs should be happening throughout the OKR cycle and should take place in the one-on-one sessions between an employee and their leader. They should also occur at the end of an OKR cycle.
The conversation should be in-person or over a video conferencing service, not on Slack or over the phone, and should include goal-setting, reflection, and ongoing progress updates. The feedback should be risk-free, specific and constructive. Employees should leave knowing what their leader needs from them, and leaders should leave knowing what the employee needs from them and the organization.
What is different in a post-COVID-19 World?
COVID-19 has put stresses on the organization that CFRs can address. Specifically:
CFRs form the new social structure
Our unifying force is the organization: we know each other and interact because of our jobs. Leveraging that common ground - the work we do - creates a forcing function to have frequent conversations. CFRs, through our OKRs, give us something to talk about while we work together, while we are apart. Specifically we recommend:
CFRs enable Leadership to be much clearer about what needs to be accomplished
Just creating an OKR or a project plan does not provide enough clarity to ensure alignment and focus. We used to gather this additional data in ad-hoc meetings and passing comments. Since those no longer happen, use frequent CFRs to ensure:
CFRs provide intrinsic rewards to employees - and Leaders!
As Daniel Pink outlined in Drive, intrinsic rewards are the largest performance driver (more than compensation!) in most organizations. Dan suggests Purpose, Mastery and Autonomy are the most important three intrinsic motivators. CFRs enable these three:
CFRs provide transparency to what has been accomplished
It’s lonely out there - especially now that so many of us are remote working. How do we see day-to-day progress? How do we know we are working on the right things and making appropriate progress? CFRs deliver that immediate feedback - that goes beyond the “numbers” (KRs) and lets the employees know that the moment-to-moment decisions they make to deal with real-time issues are appropriate.
Imagine a post-COVID-19 world without CFRs
We recently worked with an organization that had a “set and forget” approach to their OKRs. Once they were set, leadership would attend to other things and only loopback at the end of the period. When COVID-19 forced them to work remotely, they saw OKR progress slow, employee engagement decrease (as measured by people going ‘above and beyond’ the assigned work) and interpersonal chatter drop (as measured by Slack conversation analysis).
Employee interviews indicated that remote workers felt isolated, poorly supported by leadership, and unclear on what they were supposed to do.
The organization instituted weekly CFRs at both the Team and Employee level (one hour/week and fifteen minutes/week, respectively) and they saw:
They also saw the unintended outcomes of:
