How To Run & Present OKR Daily Standups
Business meetings are a crucial aspect of every business organization. They help employees keep track of day-to-day activities and processes, leading to better time management and making achieving business objectives easier. Meetings are crucial because team members and management can discuss important topics, improve their bond as a team, solve problems, collaborate, share ideas, and stay updated.
Whether you love meetings or not, they’re a regular part of any modern business. Finding a convenient time for a meeting and getting everyone on board can sometimes be challenging. With OKR standups, you can get everything done quickly without disrupting your processes.
What are OKR daily standups?
OKR daily standups are short meetings lasting from 15 to 25 minutes, during which the active management and the team reflect on their progress and outline the key priorities for the week. OKR is short for “Objective and Key Results,” it’s a goal-oriented framework that helps organizations track goals and achieve them by aligning efforts around real metrics.
OKR standups are a known strategy that helps leaders give employees accurate and extensive layouts of larger goals and plans for achieving them. The main purpose of an OKR is to ensure everyone in the organization is working together towards common OKR goals with clear priorities.
Whether discussing a non-profit organization, software development team, or office operations, OKRs set common goals through different company levels. Some people even use them for personal goals. Daily OKR standups take place each day and are used to reflect on the current goals and processes in place for achieving them.
What is the goal of an OKR daily standup?
As the name implies, the main focus of OKR daily standups are the goals and achievements. That keeps everyone calibrated towards the same game plan, connected, and informed of key events. Benchmarks tell you how much you have left to achieve your goals and how you can achieve them.
To get the best possible results, your goals must be measurable, realistic, specific, time-bound, and verifiable. These things set clear expectations within the company and ensure everyone is updated with the current tasks and operations.
If you have an agile team dynamic, OKR standups are a perfect fit, but this approach can be used with any other project management method. Now let’s talk about the OKR framework and its key two elements.
OKR objectives
Objectives or goals are simply those things you want your business to achieve. Traditionally objectives are inspirational, action-oriented, clear, and important. You must design and deploy your objectives accurately because this is how you can prevent misunderstandings, poor execution, and fuzzy thinking.
OKR key results
The primary role of these key results is to monitor and benchmark how the organization will reach its objectives. An effective key result is realistic, time-limited, and specific. Most importantly, key results are something that you can measure and can verify.
An organization must be able to determine whether a particular requirement has been met or not. There should be no room for any speculation, and - while some objectives can remain unchanged for a long time - key results constantly evolve throughout the process.
How to do daily standups in OKR
You must keep several things in mind to run smooth daily standups in OKR. The best thing about it is that you don’t need a lot of preparation because these are daily meetings you can prepare for in 15 minutes. Regardless of the project management methodology or tool you use, here are some things you should consider:
Find the right time for your standups
Consistency and commitment are crucial for daily standups in OKR. Your standup meetings should start at the same time every day and be your first priority. Ideally, you should hold the meetings at the same place and be consistent so everyone can attend and get on the same page.
Remember that these meetings can only be effective if everyone’s attending. Whether you’re holding a meeting for your entire team or the organization, find a time that works for everyone. It might be challenging, but you only have to do it once.
If you hold a meeting with people absent, they won’t hear what others have done the previous day or understand the challenges someone had. That will create a disconnect in your core team, and you won’t get the desired benefits of OKR meetings.
If you can’t find the perfect time for your daily gatherings, use the best standup tools to automate daily meeting routines and save time in the process.
Determine who’s the leader
Your standups must have a clear leader. This person moderates everything and ensures communication is going according to plan. Leaders do things like timeboxing status updates, ensuring everyone is in the meeting, giving people word, managing the meeting, etc.
Establish a clear purpose for the meeting
Everyone in the meeting should know what the standup is all about. Team members should structure their updates, and if you have new team members, give them the time to observe how you do things and listen to others before pitching in with their updates.
Everyone must share the same three pieces of information we talked about earlier. The leader should keep track of what everyone sees and steer the conversation in the right direction. If necessary, they should cut the conversation and move on to the next employee.
The best daily standup practice is to shape every meeting around the essential standup meeting questions, thus ensuring everyone is familiar with the project goals and individual tasks at hand.
Keep standups short
Standup meetings should be short, like a sprint. There’s no exact rule on how much time specific teams or companies should spend at their standups, but the minimum should be at least 15 minutes, with the maximum at 25 minutes. The primary factor here is the size of your team. Make sure everyone shares their daily status update and action items.
Leave room for post-standup conversations
Team members will share challenges during meetings, and people will often try to solve those problems. Instead of doing this during the meeting and taking your OKR standups off course, leaving room for table conversations afterward is better.
Take notes of all issues and let people share status updates. After the meetings end, those who think they know how to solve problems can approach you and talk more about the issues. Others who feel they can’t contribute anything more should be free to go.
The benefits of doing OKR daily standups
Doing OKR daily standups might seem like a minor change, but you can get incredible benefits, including:
Aligning your team
Daily OKR standups effectively bring entire teams on the same page, thus streamlining their path toward achieving key business goals. That way, it becomes much easier to prioritize tasks. Each team member will know what they need to work on at a given moment.
Improved focus
Daily OKR standups help you rally your team behind smaller daily priorities. Employees can often lose track of their daily tasks, and OKR standups remind them quickly where they are and what they’ve done the day before.
Tracking progress
OKRs let all organization members track their progress toward the main goal. That helps them anticipate issues and change their approach timely to achieve their goals more quickly.
Improved commitment
OKR standups require employees to stay focused and committed during the meetings. Subsequently, this motivates them to set and stick to their priorities more effectively.
What information should you present at your daily OKR standup?
The leader of the daily OKR standups should be focused and ensure all team members share the necessary information. Leaders should also ensure they stay on course and keep meetings focused on the agenda.
Progress towards OKR objectives
All updates about milestones or completed tasks should be shared during standups. At the same time, everyone should also talk about the challenges they’ve encountered along the way. You can also allow team members to explain how they overcame their challenges briefly.
Important concerns and questions
If there are any concerns or questions about the OKR results or metrics, you must talk about them during the meetings. It will help you align the whole team and steer them in the right direction while ensuring everyone’s on the same page.
How are OKR results affecting the work of your team?
Always share information, metrics, or insights generated by OKR methodology. Your team will be happy to know how much they’re progressing using OKR, which will keep them on board with your meetings. Not tracking the results of OKR efforts is a common mistake you shouldn’t make in an agile culture.
Future OKR steps
Discussing all actions, tasks, or processes that must be completed to achieve primary business goals is essential. Defining the steps that will bring the team closer to each goal is equally important. All this will help keep your team on track, preparing each member for what’s to come.
How to improve OKR daily standups over time
Your daily meetings can always get better. When planning meeting activities, a project manager or team leader should first tell everyone what’s expected and prepare them for what will happen. That’s how you can get people on board with your meetings and get better results.
But over time, you must adjust your approach to standup and changes to keep things fresh and get even better results. Here are some of the things you should do:
First off, you should check/update your OKRs regularly. You can’t simply set your OKRs once and rely on team KPI forever. You should check your OKRs every three or four months to keep things in check, track your results, and give teams the time necessary to make progress and adjust according to their goals.
Secondly, always check the time you need to get things done. Your OKR daily standups are designed to be short and help your whole team get updated and on the same page quickly. You should have ample time to share crucial information on a daily basis, so adjust and expand your meetings or shorten them accordingly.
Thirdly, teach people to keep it short. People will often get carried away when discussing their challenges. Pay attention to how often this happens and work with people to teach them to stick to the topic. Leave these conversations for outside of the meetings.
And, finally, use the information at meetings to your advantage. Take regular notes during standups. Summarize the key points of the meetings, write down good ideas, and outline the main lessons you or your team have learned. You can use these notes to make action plans, improve OKR standups, create customized stand-ups, and learn about individuals. Nowadays, you have an array of top-grade AI note taking apps to help you streamline note capturing during daily standups and ensure you never miss an important detail.
Achieve your OKR with Ayanza’s daily standups
You can look at writing OKRs as a separate project you must handle. All projects need the right tools that make it easier to achieve results, track progress, and brainstorm ideas. These tools include project management tools, trackers, whiteboards, goal libraries, etc.
A project management tool is the most complete tool with everything you need for the process. However, you may need a project management tool for task management and tracking processes. Ayanza is a newcomer in the project management tools game, but it is a game-changer right out of the gate. This software incorporates AI technology within its features and can be used as a daily standup tool.
You can use Ayanza to do many different tasks, helping the entire team save time and improve performance. When it comes to the topic of this article, OKR daily standups, you can use Ayanza to align individual OKRs with your company goals, allowing team members to understand how they can contribute to help achieve organizational quarterly goals.
With Ayanza, you can name goals, set due dates, set who is responsible for each specific task, share access with people who are working on the project, and get valuable information that will streamline the workflow. Furthermore, Ayanza offers a state-of-the-art AI writer which can be helpful with writing OKRs and improve your daily standups to maximize effectiveness.
