Re:Ask HN: What does performance management look like at you...
by ggregoire on Friday September 04, 2020 @07:29PM
(#24379959)
> 3 months later they're already forgotten and out of date. Some managers will try to keep it going for their teams, because that's what they were told to do, but that'll peter out once they realise no-one else in the org is taking it seriously.
> 6 - 12 months later there'll be a half-hearted attempt to reset and resurrect the OKR process, but after the first time people take it even less seriously the second time around, and after a few more months OKRs are never mentioned again.
At GitLab (I don't work there but it's explained in their public handbook), OKRs are updated/redefined every quarter. Seems a good way to avoid the issues you are describing.
Re:Ask HN: What does performance management look like at you...
by edgefield0 on Friday September 04, 2020 @05:43PM
(#24379179)
I've had a similar experience with OKRs. The issue becomes how often to review and update? On the surface, OKRs seems like it would be a helpful tool but in practice it seems pretty cumbersome and only moderately useful to guide goal directed action.
Re:Ask HN: What does performance management look like at you...
by srtjstjsj on Friday September 04, 2020 @06:32PM
(#24379560)
OKRs are useful at the level of the company that has medium and long term goals, not merely keeping the lights on and reacting to short term emergencies.
An OKR is about a paragraph of text per quarter, hardly seems cumbersome.
They'll get rolled out with a big hype, people will fill them out with varying degrees of diligence and understanding of how OKRs are supposed to work.
3 months later they're already forgotten and out of date. Some managers will try to keep it going for their teams, because that's what they were told to do, but that'll peter out once they realise no-one else in the org is taking it seriously.
6 - 12 months later there'll be a half-hearted attempt to reset and resurrect the OKR process, but after the first time people take it even less seriously the second time around, and after a few more months OKRs are never mentioned again.