OKR Resources for Assistants 

An Assistant's go-to guide for learning about OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), or goals, and getting involved in their company's process.

Base empowers executive-assistant alignment

Leaders are called to navigate contingency, and as an EA we know that can make your job exciting - but at times difficult! We’ve built our software to help manage communications around strategic initiatives like OKRs and other crucial updates for executives.

If you’re interested in how Base can help streamline communications between you and your executive, fill out the form and we'll be in touch.

You can also catch Base Customer Success Manager Mallory Greer's demo of our product from our OKR Summit below!

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See how Base helps with assistant-executive goal alignment:

OKR Resources for Assistants 

OKRs 101: So, What are OKRs?

OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results, are a basic structure for how a company conducts goal setting. The objectives are the actual goals a team or organization is setting. Key results are the metrics that will show whether or not they’ve achieved the Objectives. Every Objective should have 3-5 Key Results.
 
It's important to understand that Objectives are the meant to be focused on aspirational goals and how they're supposed to help guide and steer you towards success. They Key Results are what specific targets are meant to be hit.

The purpose of OKRs

The easiest way to think about OKRs is that it helps connect and align an organization’s daily actions with its intentions — or its core mission, vision, and values. By setting OKRs, companies are forced to step back and prioritize the 3-5 most important things that will move the business forward.
 
Read more about the basics of OKRs in this blog post.

How do OKRs matter to me as an assistant?

Leaders are called to navigate contingency, and as an EA we know that can make your job exciting - but at times difficult! Where the EA come sin with strategic initiatives like OKRs is helping the executive(s) they support advance priorities to the ultimate vision — this where you make yourself indispensable.

Tips for EAs: Inserting yourself into an existing OKR/goal-setting process and how to navigate

An important thing to remember is that accountability for owning the success of OKRs is the executive. To make sure that each department's vision is aligned to the overall company vision, goal-setting progresses down through an organization’s layers.
 
Olivia Kowalski is an EA in the finance and legal department and Get Your Guide, and in her session (watch below!) at our OKR summit, she walked through how her Chief of Staff encouraged her and the team of EAs early on to become involved in the company's OKR process so they had an understanding of how they were going to take the company OKRs from a high level and break it down into a team level. 
 
 
 
Download the slide deck from this session here.
 
However this process is managed at your own company, the one thing to make sure of is that each department is aware of how their goals cascade down from the company's so there's alignment across the entire organization.

Cadence of syncing with other EA teams / checking in on OKR progress

As Olivia states in her session, for every department it's different. Her teams (finance and legal) meet once/month, but for other departments like sales, it makes sense to meet every week. These meetings walk through the status of the team's progress to hitting the Key Results tied to each Objective, any roadblocks, adjustments that need to be made, and the like.
 
In terms of how you track progress to goal that can depend! Lots of companies use OKR software, or even Google sheets, to keep track of daily/weekly progress.
 
What we find most powerful here at Base is empowering assistants to send the leaders they support executive summaries of OKR/goal progress in a daily or weekly Digest (AKA, briefing), including what's most important to the executive, so they don't get caught in the weeds. View templates you can use below! 

End of quarter review: Where an EA is essential

At the end of the quarter, the teams at Get Your Guide review what worked, what didn’t, and learnings to take into the next quarter’s drafting stage for goals. This post-mortem is how you make yourself essential in this process! Supporting alignment in tradeoff discussions and knowing what to escalate to the c-level, so you can be FOCUSED and sort out what's most successful. This is why EAs are crucial to the OKR process, because they have great communication skills.

Base templates to use for OKR/Goal check-ins with your executive(s)

Here are custom Base Digest templates we created that can you can use today (for free!) to help with specific goal/OKR check-ins. View it below or in our app in the Digest Template Library:

Quarterly Goal Update (by quarter) template

Click here to view the full template. Login to Base to access and customize this in our Template Library.Screen+Recording+2021-06-08+at+04.06.05+PM

Quarterly Goal Update (by goal) template

Click here to view the full template. Login to Base to access and customize this in our Template Library.
Screen+Recording+2021-06-08+at+09.50.24+PM

EA Goals | 2021 template

Click here to view the full template. Login to Base to access and customize this in our Template Library.
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Additional sessions from the Base OKR Summit

OKRs From an Executive/Company's Perspective

OKR Consultant Tim Whitmire outlines the significance of the OKR process as it relates to the leaders you support and their impact on the business. View the deck from Tim's session here.

Base 101 Demo

Learn all about Base, the first-ever platform built for assistants.

Assistants Win With Base
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Base User

On Base Digest

“[My current client] and I know that if things get hectic and we can't meet one-on-one to do that, the weekly Base Digest will cover it for us.

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Base User

On Base Dossier

"I did use a Word document to keep track of dossier information about clients, and now I handle all of that in Base, which is much easier.

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Virtual Assistant Base User

On Base Digest

"We still use [our daily tools]: Gmail, Google Calendar, Trello and Slack. The difference is that Base allows us to combine many of the activities in each of those apps into a single location for a dashboard view of what we have going on."

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Virtual Assistant Base User

On Base Digest

"My client and I have several tools that we use for project management, scheduling, email, and communication. Each works well, but they don't all necessarily coordinate seamlessly. Having the ability to take a snapshot overview of [everything] is always a struggle. That's where Base comes in very handy. I put together a weekly [Digest] that helps us have [one place] to look at the week ahead."

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