Here's how you can measure your own performance

Do you know how well you are doing at work? Obviously, you can wait for your annual or semi-annual performance review. However, those are often perfunctory experiences, with little feedback from managers. Managers complain that they lack the bandwidth to put real thought into their assessment. A more proactive approach is to track your own performance and be aware of how well you are performing against goals.

Let us talk about results and measuring yourself against specific goals. Knowledge work is notoriously hard to measure. As a result, most organisations use industrial era metrics such as hours logged in. However, the quality of one’s output is unrelated to the time spent on the task.

Most companies ask employees to set annual goals. The more evolved companies suggest that these goals should be SMART goals — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound. These are fine for official documentation and bonus setting. We, however, have a problem with Achievable. If you achieve your goals, you are not ambitious enough. Because you always set a high bar for your performance.

Objectives and Key Results

The Objectives and Key Results (OKR) framework was created by legendary investor John Doerr when he worked at Intel. Doerr was deeply influenced by Andy Grove’s effectiveness as a leader and closely observed the simple tactics that Grove used to set and achieve goals. Subsequently, Doerr introduced OKRs at Google. From then on, the framework skyrocketed in popularity.

As defined by Doerr, the framework breaks goals into two components: 1) The Objective. This is the “what” — the end state of where you want to be. 2) Key Results. These describe the “how”. Key results are the roadmap for how you will achieve the Objective. Objectives are most effective if they are connected to the larger organisational mission, and whether they are audacious as well as meaningful. They should represent a significant change from where you currently are, making them audacious.

Picking small or incremental Objectives will not inspire the bold action that you are capable of. They should be meaningful and the top priority for the next 60 - 90 days. Objectives must be so inspiring that they stay on the top of your mind and have the oomph to pep you up.

Key Results help us get over inertia. They answer the dreaded “What next” question. They answer the three to five biggest things that must change in the next ninety days to make the Objective a reality. Similar to Objectives, well-defined key results are specific and time-bound. They clearly state what needs to happen and by when. They are aggressive (yet not moon-shots). They should require us to stretch ourselves. They are measurable and verifiable.

Let us look at a specific example. Suppose you want to compete in a race. Instead of setting an amorphous goal of “run a race,” try to be more specific such as “run 10K race in Mumbai Marathon 2022”. An example of an OKR around competing in a race is here:

O: Compete in the 10K Mumbai race in 2022

KR1: Run 5 kilometres once every weekend

KR2: Run 3 kilometres on the treadmill 2-3 times a week

KR3: Document the time taken and work on reducing the time by X minutes per month

KR4: Reach the goal of under 45 minutes, two weeks before the date of the race

Obviously, the above is a made-up example for a personal goal. The beauty of OKRs is that they can be scaled up from the individual level to team and organisational levels. How many Objectives should you have? It depends, but we like the idea of limiting yourself to three per quarter, with four to five key results for each Objective. But these should be your most important priorities and should represent a step-change if you are able to achieve them.

So, will you be reactive and wait for the systems to track and grade your performance? Or will you be proactive and take charge of your performance measures and race towards your goals? To quote from the famous poem Invictus, you can be proactive and say: I am the Master of my fate, I am the Captain of my soul!

(The author is a social entrepreneur who guides professionals)