Viva Goals: How to adopt the OKR Framework with Microsoft Teams

Planning business strategies is not difficult.

You just need to have the right mindset.

And the right tools.

Find both in our article.

What is Microsoft Viva Goals

Viva Goals is the Microsoft Viva module for tracking business goals in a simple, clear and engaging way for all people within an organization.

This module stems from Microsoft's desire to offer companies a tool they can use to apply in their digital work environment with the now popular OKR Framework, the methodology that relies on goals (Objectives) and results (Key Results) to increase productivity.

In fact, Viva Goals is designed to help a company define its main strategic objectives and establish the results that teams and individuals need to achieve in order to materialize them, coordinating their activities.

So let's see together what the benefits of the OKR Framework are and how to adopt it successfully using Viva Goals, its features and its integration with Microsoft Teams.

How to track business goals
according to the OKR Framework

The OKR Framework is a framework for business planning developed by Andrew Grove, president and CEO of Intel, based on two key elements:

1. Objectives, which define the direction toward which all of a company's activities and processes should point. According to Grove, they must be:

• Meaningful.
• Concrete.
• Action-oriented.
• Strongly inspirational.
  
  

2. Results, which are the necessary actions to be taken to achieve a given goal. To be useful, the results must be:

• Specific.
• Time-bound.
• Ambitious.
• Realistic.
• Measurable.
  
  

Together, goals and results return as broad and detailed an overview of the corporate vision to create synergy simultaneously among departments, teams and individuals.

Indeed, the OKR Framework serves to decline corporate strategies into projects in which all people in the company are expected to participate and contribute, moving beyond the separations that often make communication between different departments difficult.

Let's clarify with an example.

Let's imagine that your company wants to increase its online visibility.

We could express this intent with the phrase:

 

“I want to increase the visibility of my brand”

Is this a good goal according to the OKR Framework? Yes, because it is:

• Meaningful = high-level.
• Concrete = leads to tangible change.
• Action-oriented = can be declined into at least one outcome.
• Inspirational = engages corporate audiences, calling them to action.

Now that we have identified a valid goal, we can identify the results needed to achieve it.

An example is the Key Result for the Marketing and Communications department:

 

“Create 100 pieces of content to be posted on
the company website and social media by Q1”

We know that this is a useful result because it is:

• Specific = corresponds to a precise action.
• Time-bound = there is a deadline for its tracking.
• Ambitious, but also realistic.
• Measurable = progress made is based on the number of content posted.

We talked earlier about how goals and outcomes help improve communication between departments.

It might seem that our example strays from this premise, since the outcome related to the goal concerns people in only one team (Marketing and Communication).

However, if more technical information was needed to produce the content, perhaps to write an article about some product details, here is the result of the Marketing department leading to collaboration with the R&D department. For example, we could establish the new result:

 

“Arrange 2 interviews per week until the end of Q1”

Or we could assign an outcome only to people in the R&D department to support communication activities. An example might be:

“Record 9 tutorials to show product functionality by Q1”

Increasing brand visibility thus becomes a shared goal. But it doesn't end there.

In fact, the team's result can be broken down into smaller parts to better track its progress.

Taking our example again, we could divide the result:

 

“Record 9 tutorials to show product functionality by Q1”

in

“Record 3 tutorials by the end of January”

“Record 3 tutorials by the end of February”

“Record 3 tutorials by the end of March”

and assign these three results to one or more people in the R&D section.

The benefits of the OKR Framework are thus now evident.

On the one hand, business strategies are finally communicated in a simple and practical way to the entire organization; on the other hand, autonomy is given to teams to establish, plan, share, and track their results.

 

 

There is a problem, however, that often prevents companies from adopting the approach devised by Grove.

This fundamental problem is the lack of adequate tools to analytically monitor both the goals and the results an organization has set for itself.

That's where Viva Goals comes in.