OKR in educational teaching
OKRs have been a perfect tool to achieve goals through key results when working with remote teams to increase work performance, so why not set goals in teams that are geared towards improving education?
It was observed the case of instructors who were not clear about the objectives that the new initiatives in remote teaching should meet; In first place, it has been a challenge to learn from new digital tools and generate new ways of teaching, this has led to not being able to have a clear assessment of remote teaching, when conducting reviews there was no way to assess whether the teachers met the expectations of remote teaching.
The team where the experiment was carried out is made up of 4 instructors, who are teaching distance classes for upper secondary education in Mexico, who have sought new ways to bring education to various homes remotely.
The team where the experiment was carried out is made up of 4 instructors who are teaching distance classes for upper secondary education in Mexico, which has sought new ways to bring education to different homes remotely.
The practice was carried out online using the Zoom and Miro tools, through which all members participated and were able to receive comments or discuss points that required a group approach.
Generating this practice helped to provide the team with a mapping of their day-to-day activities to link them to the objectives, as well as having transparency in the key results that are being achieved to achieve the proposed objectives.
I invite you to learn more about this OKR practice on the management 3.0 official page https://management30.com/practice/okrs/
At the beginning of 2021, the objectives that the team should meet in one month were set to determine the value of the results generated.
The dynamics to execute this practice consisted of the following steps:
1. The leader, together with the team of instructors and based on the projection of their activities, determines the objectives to be met during a base period (if the organization already works with periodic objectives, these can be considered to form the OKRs).
2. Together with the team, the key results of each objective were raised through a quantifiable value (this can be percentage or numerical), which must be a commitment to be fulfilled by the entire team in the quarter.
3. Once the OKRs have been generated, they were compared with the activities that contribute to generating the results of each objective, which can be monitored during the proposed period to know their progress.
4. At the end of the period, the results achieved are reviewed to determine which objectives were completed and which objectives were pending to be achieved based on the goal set.
Some considerations:
• It is recommended to raise the key expected results quarterly when working with strategic objectives, although to start experimenting with teams in agile frameworks, shorter periods (2–4 weeks) can be established.
As a facilitator, I learned that when generating the objectives through the Miro tool, 2 things are achieved: first, to support the educational improvement of the instructors through a designated space that is visible to the team to keep the objectives in mind. ; Second, by making use of the Miro platform we are promoting the use of digital tools, which allows the team that the results are transparent for them and focus on their activities, keeping in mind that they contribute to the value of each objective.
The team has achieved 2 of the 3 objectives that were raised in the month and something worth highlighting is the visibility with which the objectives are counted, this has helped the team to generate its activities continuously with greater commitment and motivation knowing that they contribute to the generation of value for themselves and the students.
In my next experiment with this practice, once the achieved objectives are reviewed, based on the results, new more ambitious objectives will be proposed to find the optimum point of the team’s performance and in case some objectives have not been reached, it will be It is important to analyze what is preventing them from being achieved to take necessary actions to avoid future impediments.
With the results of this experiment, the team obtained clarity of the objectives that are being achieved and in which they have difficulties generating an impulse that leads them to take action as necessary to achieve them. Despite being in an educational environment, the instructors have taken the practice as one more challenge to meet the expectations of the students in delivering their courses, as well as one more motivator to achieve the goal.
I invite you to do this practice, the fact of generating goals to be achieved during a specific period supports the motivation of the team, although the practice can be complicated when setting objectives (especially in environments where uncertainty is a constant) can help you much clarify and establish the goals you want to achieve with your team in a certain period, it is important to remember that the expected results must be by the objectives to be able to perceive the benefits that will surely support you to achieve the expected value.