OKRs arrived with a Google-shaped halo, and plenty of teams copied the format without the thinking behind it. Hannes Albrecht has spent 12 years cleaning up what happens next. A former sales and marketing lead who now coaches management teams on OKRs, he's blunt about the pattern he sees most: companies start with a few goals that drive real change, then slowly bury the system in key results until everyone dreads it.
In this OKRs 101 episode of the Team Check-In, Hannes tells host Emre Ok what OKRs are, and what they aren't, from a dressed-up task list to a stealth performance review. He makes the case for measuring impact over percentage complete, and shows why OKRs fit a neobank and an elderly-care home just the same. He also walks through the nightmare version: a well-known consumer brand that ended up tracking close to a thousand conditions every quarter, until the word "OKR" was so burned they nearly had to rename it. Hannes also joined Teamflect for a webinar on implementing OKRs which you can watch any time.
1. OKRs put strategy into action. Albrecht defines them as a way to align teams on a specific focus for a short window, tied to measurable results. They're the change work, kept separate from the business as usual that pays the bills today.
2. They aren't a performance score. OKRs get set bottom-up by teams, not handed down to grade individuals. Hitting 60 or 70% while making real impact beats hitting 100% on goals that changed nothing.
3. Complexity is what actually kills OKRs. One well-known consumer brand grew to hundreds of key results and close to a thousand tracked conditions a quarter, until people dreaded the word. His fix: simplify massively, and protect the two or three things that really drive change.
4. Weak strategy dooms OKRs before they start. When the strategic direction is fuzzy, every cycle turns into an argument about what to prioritize. Management has to model the discipline too, not kick it off because it looked good on LinkedIn.
5. Alignment is the real win. Albrecht's best case was a neobank whose C-suite was so aligned they wrote sharp first company OKRs in about two and a half hours. Give an internal OKR champion the job of keeping that quality from eroding over time.
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Hannes / How-to-OKR (00:00.755)
Yeah, it worked out. We had a chat again. We were just, yeah, I was just telling her again about your audience and their capabilities about OKRs because she had something in mind from you that it's more going to be a real workshop to basically create OKRs. But then in our last conversation, we said that probably the audience is not...
Emre (00:02.411)
Awesome.
Emre (00:22.242)
Mm-hmm.
Hannes / How-to-OKR (00:30.225)
at this stage.
Emre (00:31.042)
Yeah, we said like, yeah, overall we said like, yeah, basics and how to implement them in your company. that's, yeah, perfect, perfect. So I'm glad that error was cleared with her. Give me one second to make some final adjustments.
Hannes / How-to-OKR (00:38.579)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. All good.
Emre (00:54.478)
And yeah, we've prepared a lot of materials, so all the publishing and all the broadcasting goes out today. So all the emailing lists and everything, they're going out today as well. But for this one, we're just going to go over the overall conversation points I sent you beforehand. All right. All right. So.
Yeah, without delaying anything further, I'll just start things off by saying, hi everyone, welcome to another episode of the Team Check-In. And with me today, we have the voice on OKRs. We have Mr. HowtoOKRs. The H in his name stands for HowtoOKRs. It's Hans Albert. Hans, how are you? How's everything?
Hannes / How-to-OKR (01:39.478)
Ha!
Hannes / How-to-OKR (01:50.237)
All good. Thanks for having me. Thanks for your time. Cool to be here.
Emre (01:56.416)
It's awesome having you on board and today we are taking a dive into anything and everything OKR, which I'm very excited about. But for those in the audience who may not be very familiar with you and your work, can you give us the Albrecht 101?
Hannes / How-to-OKR (02:15.413)
Sure. Well, I'm in this space for like, like 12 years now, which is pretty long time when it comes to OKRs. My background is actually sales and marketing. So I was, I was working in a pretty grown up startup back then. And we heard about this thing called OKRs. There was no literature, no book out there. But we thought, hey, it's coming from Google. Sounds cool. Let's give it a try. And we failed miserably.
but we, we said, okay, there is something which definitely makes sense. Let's try it again and again and again. And at some point, I realized, it's cool that teams understand way better, how they can contribute to this whole thing. And they got more connected with strategy.
Yeah, and that makes sense. And basically I jumped on this and I'm doing this for 12 years now, helping teams, companies to get up to speed with OKRs and or to, to fine tune that it basically fits to the team or to the company's culture and how they work. Yeah. Super small agency. It's more a boutique thing. Primarily we work with the, with management teams, C-levels.
Emre (03:37.016)
Yeah. And the rise of OKRs to prominence in the public discourse was rather abrupt and fast, right? It was like, there's a Google Playbook and suddenly, this is how we're supposed to do things now. And every company kind of sort of had their own interpretation of how to implement OKRs, what they were. And some saw it like, OK, we have an objective and we will just call our subgoals key results. And that's going to be that. So it was like,
There was a lot of confusion. So before we get into anything, let's do the three W's of OKRs. What are they, what are they not, and who are they for?
Hannes / How-to-OKR (04:22.131)
Okay. In, in, in a kind of one sentence pitch, I would say, okay, Oz for me are about operationalizing your strategy across the teams you have by, by setting and aligning a specific key focus for a short period of time. And you try to connect that with measurable results.
you would like to land in this time frame, in this given time frame, right?
Emre (04:57.242)
And what is the main misconception about it? What are they not, let's say?
Hannes / How-to-OKR (04:57.567)
That's it.
Hannes / How-to-OKR (05:05.94)
It's not a tool to handle everything. It's not a tool to handle projects. It's not a tool to handle your daily doing. I'd like to call it business as usual. It's not a task list type of thing. It's not a...
It's nothing to measure people's performance. That's an important one. And it's nothing which will work immediately. of like, yeah, you need some time connected with it. Why? Because it's about the way people work. It's about habits. And if you'd like to change habits, it always takes time. You can't expect it.
Now it's working, it's not gonna work like this.
Emre (06:05.24)
You said something really interesting there. So before going over to which companies OKRs are for, you said OKRs are not to measure people's performance. Can you elaborate a bit on that? Is this a mistake you see being made where people are setting individual OKRs for people and using them as a performance metric?
Hannes / How-to-OKR (06:12.434)
Yep.
Hannes / How-to-OKR (06:32.294)
Yeah, absolutely. Especially when it's about companies who, you know, used to work a lot with individual performance indicators and then OKRs comes on board and then there is a big confusion. Okay, what is what? But I would like to separate these two things. It is still important also with OKRs to think about how can we measure
teams performances or individual performances. But on the other hand, it's the OKR part where it's simply about trying or agreeing and trying to solve problems which are on our way to reach our ultimate goal or to go towards our strategic goals. And these OKRs are set by teams, are set by
the people within the teams by themselves. So it's more a button up thing, trying to connect to these top down strategic things. So there is nobody telling me, okay, this is your goal, try to reach it. It's more about me as a team or me as part of a team saying, okay, this is where we want to end up. Let's try to figure out what we can do to get there, to get there a little bit further.
So we set our goals by ourselves more or less. And then these goals are based on ambitions. It's not clear how we reach it. It's not clear whether we reach it. It's more about getting as close as possible. And by getting as close as possible and concentrating on this thing, solving this problem, we might to end
We might end up at a point where mathematically it's not reaching 100 % or 120 % or 90%. But we created an impact. We created something which wasn't there before. We are on a good way to solve that problem. And I would like rather to have these conversations about performance around
Hannes / How-to-OKR (08:55.764)
What impact have you made with your OKRs? And not about how much percentage of your OKRs have you accomplished? That's not, it's not bringing us anywhere. It's more about maybe mathematically I reached only, I reached only 60, 70 % of my OKRs or our team's OKRs. But with those 60, 70 % achievement, we've made a lot of impact.
Emre (08:58.626)
Hmm.
Hannes / How-to-OKR (09:24.54)
Let's talk about the impact part and let's not so much talk about the mathematical result of my occurs.
Emre (09:33.59)
that's a great approach because in many cases goal setting can be even though if you have a goal and the goal is to reach a certain number so it's not like a binary right it's not a one or a zero it's not failed or accomplished if the goal isn't reached during performance review season it can be seen as a failure it can be seen as
could have been accomplished, wasn't accomplished. One, zero, failure. Where taking the approach, OK, this wasn't reached, but what was the impact created towards the process? Trying to measure that, I think, is the right approach. And I think it can be applied to any form of goal setting methodology, for sure.
Hannes / How-to-OKR (10:23.656)
Yeah. And, and you know, that, that's coming back to the point. It's about changing habits. That that's one major point. You can't just change from one month to another. It's something which you need to get used to. And I'd like to call OKRs also. It's, like a betting. So we are doing bets every quarter about problems we want to solve.
And sometimes the bet is going well and sometimes we fail. That's part of it. But the sum of all bets or the sum of all achievements on the OKR part is simply increasing the chance that we reach our financial goals. Right. So or another explanation would be
All the stuff we are doing within our business as usual or daily operations is important, is super important because this is paying our salaries today. But all the OKR stuff, right? The problems we need to solve in order to reach our strategic goals is also very important because this is securing that we are able to pay our salaries in the future. And that's also
maybe explains the difference between OKRs and the business as usual part.
Emre (11:59.918)
I think that's a great explanation. I think it also kind of sort of touches upon a very heavily asked question when it comes to OKRs. Because when people see acronyms, they try to compare it to other acronyms. When people hear OKRs for the first time, they go like, so it's like KPIs. So.
Yeah, KPI can be like how you behave in the business as usual processes, how you complete them, whereas OKRs are, like you said, more projections, more where we want to be, more ambitious. So I think that is a great distinction. So another follow-up question that I wanted to touch upon was, are OKRs for everybody? Can any company adopt an OKR methodology?
Or should you say like, no, if your company fits these standards, maybe they shouldn't.
Hannes / How-to-OKR (12:56.687)
I think it's for everyone. mean, as I said, I'm in this space for 12 years now and I've worked for super young startup in the digital space. I've worked for very, very traditional industry parts. I've even worked for a company who is running basically home.
homes for elderly people. And you might think in the beginning, my God, how can there be a connection with OKRs? But they also have marketing, they have sales, they have operations, they... Right? So it also fits there. Another aspect sometimes is, okay, we are running an agency and we are heavily dependent on our client. know, our client is basically...
like a remote control, everything our client wants and needs. We are here to serve our client. And you might think, okay, how can OKRs help here? But still as an agency, I need to have a vision. I need to have a route into the future. Where do we see ourselves in like five, 10 years? And in order to get there, we need to constantly think about change.
If we would do as an agency our things always in the same way, we wouldn't be an agency in five years from now. So even an agency is able to set a few specific OKRs to drive change.
Emre (14:39.182)
that's perfect. And I think that kind of shatters the stigma around OKRs where since OKRs became prominent with such association to Google, with such like a connection to Google and some other very enterprise enterprise organizations, I think there was like a little bit of a stigma around them where you said like, oh, that's an enterprise thing. That's like a more enterprise approach. But I think this clears it. If you take it the right way, it can be applied to organizations of
all sorts. But people still do struggle implementing OKRs in their organization. They sometimes understand it on paper, understand what needs to be done on paper. Sometimes it fails in practice. Sometimes the implementation process just doesn't get going properly. So what, in your opinion, what are some of the conditions that cause OKRs to fail in organizations?
Hannes / How-to-OKR (15:40.276)
Well, what makes things really difficult is if your strategy is weak or if your strategic path is simply not defined very well, because then you always tend to have a lot of discussions whether this or that is right or wrong or where should we concentrate on in order to drive that change.
So a weak strategy is dangerous, I would say. Also dangerous is if the management is not really acting as a role model for OKR. So they kick it off in the beginning because they think it's cool and important, but then they are not.
bringing up that discipline and that endurance to make habits change. That's also a difficult thing. And we talked a little bit about in the beginning with the performance management thing. I mean, if there are conflicting or parallel goal systems in place, that's another aspect where I would say difficult.
Emre (17:04.546)
Yeah, I think a lot of organizations today suffer from a condition, a very dangerous sickness that is called, my boss saw something cool on LinkedInitis. The second you know someone sees, that looks cool, that's cool, let's try to do it in our organization without actually looking for the strategy and making sure all the conditions are right. That causes a lot of troubles.
In your experience, you've seen so many companies go into the OKR space, go into saying, OK, we're implementing OKRs. We're starting with OKRs. We're getting going. What were some of the pain points you've seen companies of all sizes struggle with when it comes to OKRs? Maybe what were some of the habits that were hardest to change?
Hannes / How-to-OKR (17:59.091)
I would say what happens very often is that you implement things, you agree, you set up rules or governance for OKRs. How do we play OKRs in our team, in our company, which is super important. Do that.
But then after one, two, three cycles, things weaken up and get loose. And you suddenly see that it's going to be more and more OKRs, more and more key results. The list gets longer and longer and longer. And there is very often the tendency that in the beginning it used to be a tool to drive change only.
And then after some cycles, as I said, it weakens up and then suddenly it becomes a tool where you try to control everything and that simply won't work. And that's what I mean with a lot of it needs a lot of discipline and endurance, especially from the management to reflect constantly and say, no, let's, let's just focus maybe on two, three things, which
which really drives change, but let's not try to follow a route where we try to control and manage everything with OKRs. Because first of all, won't work. Secondly, gets really, really complicated. And suddenly you recognize that when it's about transitioning from one quarter to the next quarter,
The process gets longer and longer and longer and the alignment process gets longer and longer and longer and it's painful. From quarter to quarter it gets more painful and then after two years the company says, well, OKRs won't work for us. But the reason is not OKRs, the reason is not sticking to the core purpose of OKRs.
Emre (20:14.574)
think that's really interesting. And one thing you said kind of stuck with me that I want you to elaborate a bit more on. You said OKRs comes in, OKRs, the OKR process comes in as a driver of change, like the initial objective is change. But then the idea becomes about OKRs turning into a tool to control everything.
Can you elaborate a bit on that? How do people kind of distort OKRs in a way that they use them to control things?
Hannes / How-to-OKR (20:52.082)
Yeah, it's mainly about this distinguishing distinction between the business as usual and the change part, right? If I'm a team and within our team we are mainly managing projects, long-term projects, then this should be seen
as part of our daily doing. That's why we exist as a team ABC, right? Because we need to manage and handle these projects. So the project itself is should not be part of OKRs and should never become part of OKRs because we are managing them anyway. That's part of our job. But if there are some pain points in how we manage them or how we
measure success or how we deliver impact to the people who should benefit from these projects. This area is super important because it goes beyond of our daily doing. It can drive change. So that part could be part of OKRs, but not managing these things per se.
Emre (22:18.274)
Could you give us, just to flesh things out a bit more, would it be possible for you to, without naming any company or client or individual names, of course, what was a nightmare scenario that you've witnessed where people completely took the wrong approach to OK Eyes?
Hannes / How-to-OKR (22:44.588)
Emre (22:46.126)
You
Hannes / How-to-OKR (22:49.67)
No. So, what I do is not only implementing OKRs, what I also do is basically coaching teams and companies or management teams who are running OKRs since quite a while. And sometimes they come to a point, okay, it feels wrong. Something feels wrong, but we don't know what and we don't know how to change it. Right. In this area, there was one company, a very, very
successful company, well known out there, a consumer brand. And they struggled big time that this whole OKR process felt very heavy, very slow. People are fed up with it.
Yeah, because it's just eating up my time. So that was the impression. And I looked into it and I found out that over the years, they really tried to over complicate and over engineered things. So for example, every single key result had a separate explanation and every key result had separate
conditions defined and if those conditions are met then the key result is met. And imagine it's a company with 15 teams and every team has like five plus key results per quarter. In some teams even more because their list was way too long. So it adds up to several hundreds of key results defining even
close to 1,000 conditions every quarter when things are met. And that was really a nightmare because the whole system was broken. And it was really, we were having a hard time to restart it because also the name was burned. If you call out OKRs, everybody was saying, my God.
Hannes / How-to-OKR (25:14.477)
Leave me alone with it. So we were close to rebranding OKRs to something else and make it very, very simple. Simplify it. And that's also one message to you out there. If you do OKRs, simplify it massively. Don't overcomplicate it. Make it super simple.
Emre (25:39.922)
I love that. And yeah, we do have a tendency to over-engineer things, right? We do have a tendency to say, like, hey, look, there's the objective. These are the key results. And only in the workplace would we go, like, hey, you know what that key result needs? That key result needs more sub-key results. And those sub-key results need sub-goals. yeah, so do you usually see? Yeah.
Hannes / How-to-OKR (25:54.801)
Yeah.
Hannes / How-to-OKR (25:58.395)
Yeah.
Hannes / How-to-OKR (26:03.878)
You know what? The Germans are world champions in making things too complicated, I would say. And I'm a German.
Emre (26:15.118)
By the way, two episodes in a row, I'm interviewing German people. We've had Dr. Jörg Störm on the show before, we don't know the release order yet, but I would say we have the saying, because I'm a Turkish man interviewing a German, and we have a saying in Turkey where we go like, start like a Turk and finish like a German, because we tend to start things off very excited. We tend to start things off really go and then...
Hannes / How-to-OKR (26:38.193)
Yeah, good. And then... Cool. Good one.
Emre (26:43.466)
And then like the enthusiasm kind of trickles down.
So on the heels of that, starting like a Turk, finishing like a German, the question is, when you see organizations struggle with OKRs, and like you said, see organizations with OKRs in all the different phases, the implementation side, or coming in after they've implemented and seeing the process overall, where do you see the most cracks form usually? Do the cracks usually?
Are troubles with OKRs, do they stem from like a poor implementation and a poor introduction process or do they form along the way where know issues and habits and disciplines start intervening?
Hannes / How-to-OKR (27:31.025)
More the latter. So I would say in the beginning, you have the tendency to shape it in a way that things work out and you can see and feel a benefit. I think that's part of our natural behavior. But then over time, things get loose. You allow more and more exceptions. And I think it's more that part which needs to
be where you really need to be very disciplined and very focused and also need someone to keep an eye on. And that's why I always say the role of an internal OKR champ is super important. And the workload of this person is maybe a little bit higher in the beginning when you implement things, no doubt about it, or when you ramp up more teams.
But then also over time, when things are actually working and teams are working with OKRs, the role of an internal OKR champ is changing towards really keeping an eye on the system itself, on the processes, on the discipline and quality of OKRs. And this role is super important because usually then also I as an OKR
coach or helping you to ramp things up, I'm not there anymore. I am having touch points from time to time and the touch points are getting less, less, less. So you need someone being constantly on top of it, working in your own company and keep an eye on that discipline and routines and processes.
Emre (29:22.902)
I think that's perfect. think now that we've covered one end of the spectrum where we kind of told the horror story, I think let's move on the complete opposite direction where is there a story from like one of the companies you consulted for or that crossed your path where you went, hey, know, these guys, these guys cracked it and that's how they did it. And these guys did like a really impressive job and they've made OKR is just, you know, perfect function of their business.
And for the positive example, if you feel comfortable, you can name them.
Hannes / How-to-OKR (29:57.037)
No, I'm not naming them, but I have one example. It's a bank, right? We call it a NIO Bank. So it's a kind of startup banking company, super successful. And usually, you know, the first workshop with OKRs ramping things up. We need some time.
Emre (30:00.054)
Of course.
Hannes / How-to-OKR (30:25.648)
to get into it and usually we organize kind of a half day or daily day long workshop with the management team C-level and in this example we started to really look at the strategy at the strategic path how aligned are we how sharp it is
And then it's about just creating the first high level company OKRs with the C-level guys. And these guys were so extremely on point. They never did it before, but it was like bam, bam, bam. The quality was amazing. And they were all so aligned, which I, it's really a rare occasion that management teams are so aligned. And yeah, so they, they, they, they really rocked it.
And we were done in like, I don't know, two and a half hours. Quality was amazing for the first time. yeah, and then it worked out really well, I would say.
Emre (31:35.81)
Yeah, I think that's perfect. yeah, mean, alignment is the word of the day when it comes to usually OKRs and any form of goal setting. Now, before we move on to like towards the ending sections, I want to ask you because I think this question kind of came up on my mind when as we were discussing, you mentioned that OKRs are,
more effective when they're ambitious and they're for long term and all of that. So are there some goal setting methodologies that can work hand in hand with OKRs? What would be the best one? And what would be a goal setting approach that would contradict with OKRs?
Hannes / How-to-OKR (32:26.82)
so I would say, well, we have to differentiate a little bit with this Trump goal setting system. you know, for me, OKRs is about, operationalizing, strategy. It's, it's about, yeah, realizing.
or concentrating on the right things to move in the right direction strategically. So in order to know which mountain you want to climb as a company, need to have a format to describe that mountain you want to climb. And that format can be any different kind of format. So it can be either like an
annual OKRs, so you describe success after one year or at the end of the year. It can be also a one-page description of your annual ambitions. I don't care about the format as long as it's not going to be any kind of parallel systems or conflicting systems because then people can't follow anymore.
I think that's the most important point. And then the OKR part can be how do we break it down in quarters? Meaning we just concentrate on quarter one, agree on the focus areas for quarter one, agree accountabilities or who is owned and ownership. And then we try to execute and then we sit down after quarter one.
and concentrate on the next quarter. So we slice it quarter by quarter, but we still have a look at our longer term goal on our strategic direction. But again, I don't care about the format. I even say you don't necessarily need yearly OKRs. It can be whatever format, but it needs to give enough direction for teams to create quarterly OKRs about executing it.
Emre (34:52.684)
That's perfect. And hey, you know what else is perfect? We are not done with Hans Albrecht. No, he will be coming on for a very special webinar on the 26th of February, 11 a.m. Eastern time in the U.S. and 4 p.m. GMT in Europe. And it's going to be how to implement OKRs like an expert. you thought like, you know, this episode was helpful and if you thought you picked up some nice tidbits,
You ain't seen nothing yet. It's going to be brilliant. And Hans, can you give us like a bit of a teaser? What can people expect from you there?
Hannes / How-to-OKR (35:32.214)
Yeah, want to, so my plan is to become a little bit more hands-on and also give you some tips and tricks on how to formulate the first things and how you just, how you could start with OKRs if you've never done it before in a very simple and easy way, very straightforward. in this session, I, like I said, I also want to give you some examples and some tips and tricks to
formulate OKRs that you get a little bit of a sense of what means a good quality OKR formulation and what's not such a good quality and why. So a little bit more hands on I would say will be cool.
Emre (36:17.518)
the
It will be cool indeed. And speaking of hands-on, we will be moving on after Hans goes into the theoretical, the framework, the what and the how, we will actually be showing you a practical demo of how you can take everything you've learned and apply them in your organization using the right software, the right tools that function inside Microsoft Teams. So you don't want to miss that. Registrations are now open and you can register by using the link in the description. Hans, this has
been an amazing episode and before we wrap this up other than the webinar on the 26th where can people find you where can people reach you
Hannes / How-to-OKR (36:58.544)
Very simple, howtookr.com, how-to-okr.com. Check it out. There's also some courses up there, eLearnings, other one-pager stuff. Check it out. If you have any kind of questions, reach out to me, easy, and keep it going.
Emre (37:23.896)
That's perfect. And if you're listening to us on iTunes, Spotify, wherever you find podcasts, leave us a like, subscribe. It really helps to show out. And if you want to learn more about the highest-rated Rokera software in the Microsoft Teams ecosystem, TeamFlight, you can always click the link in the description. This has been the Team Check-in, everyone. Hans, you're always game. It was really nice having you on the show. Bye-bye, everyone.
Hannes / How-to-OKR (37:43.546)
Okay.
Emre (37:44.992)
Alright, that is a tight, tight 35 minutes. I think that's perfect.
Hannes / How-to-OKR (37:50.138)
Good.
Emre (37:53.866)
right towards the end the connection started to break off.
Hannes / How-to-OKR (37:59.522)
Yeah, you've, no, now you're back, now back, okay?
Emre (38:03.054)
wait, I think the connection is now back.
Hannes / How-to-OKR (38:11.567)
I can hear you.
Hannes / How-to-OKR (38:16.708)
I can hear you.
Hannes / How-to-OKR (38:24.368)
Am I gonna get canny Amy?
Emre (38:28.686)
Let me sort this out real quick.
Emre (39:00.442)
my god,
Hannes / How-to-OKR (39:06.288)
But did you still cover the end? it on? Okay, cool.
Hannes / How-to-OKR (39:20.624)
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