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Microsoft Viva Goals is a goal-setting solution that aligns teams to your organization’s strategic priorities to drive results and create a culture of engaged employees focused on achieving common goals.
Organizing Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) up, down, and across an organization to ensure that everyone is moving in the same direction can help your organization achieve these goals more efficiently. Alignment provides visibility, transparency, and accountability to make sure that everyone in the organization is moving in the same direction.
In this article, you'll learn:
- How to define alignment and why it's important.
- How to align OKRs up, down, and across an organization.
- Best practices for aligning your OKRs.
Tip
Writing and aligning OKRs is an iterative process. Each quarter that you create, align, and achieve your goals, the better your alignment will become. Start by aligning a few of your major goals.
Alignment definition
The concept of alignment within Viva Goals refers to the process of linking Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) up, down, and across an organization.
Aligning your goals can help your organization:
- Use resources and time more efficiently.
- Focus on and communicate top priorities.
- Adapt to the digital needs of a hybrid or remote workforce.
- Connect work groups that are siloed, disconnected, or doing redundant work.
When OKRs are properly aligned, individuals can clearly see how the work they do as part of a team contributes to the overall purpose, and makes working with cross-functional teams and remote co-workers easier.
Alignment framework: Top down and bottom up
Aligning goals using a combined top-down and bottom-up approach helps everyone in your organization work together.
Top-down alignment
In a top-down approach, senior leaders start by defining a company’s overall mission, vision, and values. They then define goals based on the organization's purpose. Being clear helps inform the strategy and direction to take.
From there, senior leadership defines annual Objectives and Key Results, the most important 3-5 goals that the company wants to achieve in the coming year.
Tip
Recommended Reading: Write annual, organizational OKRs using the 5 Ps
Guidance from top leaders is critical, as they set the direction for where the company is heading.
Bottom-up alignment
Once senior leadership has defined top-level annual OKRs, it's time to take input from non-leadership members of your organization. Employees outside of management and leadership are vital to communicating the critical day-to-day key results that contribute to the overall goals of the company. Bottom-up alignment empowers teams to create their own OKRs in support of the top 3-5 goals on a company level. Bottom-up alignment allows teams to use their experience to determine the best way to drive impact for that time period.
Visualizing OKR alignment
Once company-level OKRs are in place, teams (including Departments, Divisions, etc.) can align their Objectives up to the company level. Then, smaller sub-teams can align their Objectives to the Objectives of the parent team.
Note
These child Objectives are not identical to the ones above it, but in support of them.
Consider the following example:
One of the main Objectives at the company level is to create and engaged and diverse workforce. The objective might be:
- Objective: Create an inclusive and engaging company culture.
Appropriately, the metrics for success at the company level might focus on the team thriving, and being more diverse:
- Key Result 1: Improve our Thrive score by 20%.
- Key Result 2: Improve our diversity and inclusion percentage point for leadership by 4.
When this HR team meets to set their OKRs, they can see that one of the critical goals for senior leadership is to improve company culture.
In this case, this HR team is in the best position to know how to accomplish this mission since they are the experts on talent acquisition and retention for their company. Therefore, this HR team can set their own objectives for this mission using bottom-up knowledge.
The Objectives they might set are:
- Objective 1: Increase pathways to leadership for underrepresented communities.
- Objective 2: Adjust compensation packages to reflect market rates.
This example shows senior leaders creating a top-down mission, and a team using their specialized knowledge to create bottom-up OKRs in service of the larger goal.
Align OKRs in Viva Goals
Now that you know strategies to align your OKRs, learn how to align, and view your OKRs in Microsoft Viva Goals.
Recommendations and Best Practices
You can use these strategies to improve your healthy OKR program:
Ensure that Organizational Objectives are set: Make sure that senior leadership enters high-level objectives into Viva Goals. This enables departments to align up to these larger goals.
Ensure that Team-level Objectives align up to parent Organizational Objectives: Remember that these objectives shouldn't be identical to the ones above them, but rather in support of them.
Explore areas where common Objectives can be shared across groups through multiple alignment: Multiple alignment helps avoid siloed workstreams and ties multiple groups to a common purpose.