The first time my company decided to implement OKR's I told my manager that I'm already motivated by my own standards, and using OKR's as a carrot on a stick that I know it's deliberately and exclusively out of range is absurd.
He was staring at me as if they invented penicillin and I was too dumb to appreciate it.
I worked at a company where every year we'd decide we were going to do OKRs or something similar, and we "were going to do it right this time".
We'd spend weeks in meetings coming up goals and things we could measure, and end up with something like, "increase foo from X% to Y%". Here, "foo" is a placeholder for something or other, but the X and Y are not. We would literally leave them as variables, under the impression we'd fill them in eventually.
A year later, we'd look at them again and see that we never filled in the numbers. Then repeat. It was pretty wild.
My struggle at work is usually _reducing_ my standards for quality, performance and customer satisfaction to match those of management & colleagues, because caring more than everybody else is a recipe for burnout.
I've worked with people that say the same thing, and they are usually very smart and high functioning.
These type of people really need to work on their own startup where they can dictate the quality of work vs selling the product. It's the only way they will understand how to make the compromise between high standards and other long term product decision consequences.
I find the out of range goals to be very demotivating. During the quarter they will hold our collective noses to the grindstone telling us to get this stuff done and hit certain dates and numbers. Then maybe once a year they will say they don’t expect us to hit any numbers that are set, in typical OKR fashion.
If a game is setting me up to fail, I don’t want to play that game. My productivity has gone in the toilet ever since our management started pushing their brand of OKRs.
I don't understand, isn't your team coming up with your OKRs yourself? If you have a manager who is assigning you OKRs, that's a management problem.
In all the teams I been in we have whiteboard sessions where come up with ideas. Then we slowly move ideas into the ones we want to work on, our Objectives.
Then for those Objectives, we set a qualifier to determine if that thing was done, the Result. Next we rank these Objective/Results by priority and we remove ones that will probably not get done, boom OKRs. Not difficult.
Our OKRs are being dictated to us from several levels of management above us, who don't really understand what we even do. I know how it should work, but it's not the reality I currently live in, which is all part of the demotivation.
He was staring at me as if they invented penicillin and I was too dumb to appreciate it.