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This article is from WeChat official account: Zhengulab Research Office (ID: zhengulab), author: Feng Nuo, editor: Gong Zheng, source of title: Visual China (Dublin, Ireland, Google Office)

Article Summary

Employees of big Internet factories have stopped writing OKR, and the popularity of OKR has gradually declined. From being popular to being despised, employees believe that OKR has lost its original meaning and role.

• •    The utilization rate of OKR in China's major Internet factories has gradually declined, and many employees have begun not to write OKR or just deal with it casually.

• •    OKR and KPI are gradually being confused, and many employees mistakenly believe that the two are the same tools.

• •    The original intention of introducing OKR was to eliminate performance-based behavior, but in reality, OKR has not fully achieved this goal.

OKR (Objectives and Key Results), that is, "objectives and key results", is a management system popular in Internet giants. Formulating and reviewing OKR is a key word that many Internet companies cannot get around every quarter.

In 2013, bytes were introduced into OKR for the first time in China, and then Internet giants followed. Huawei, Tencent, Ali, Xiaomi, Baidu, JD, Meituan, Pinduoduo and many other Internet giants, even many traditional industries began to absorb this essence of management from Silicon Valley. But now, many big business people are starting to stop writing OKRs. In the context of weakened growth expectations, OKR is no longer a quick cure.

From the former sweetheart to the current Mrs. Niu

"I wrote all my boss's OKRs, and I cobbled together to determine the direction of the whole department for the next quarter." Sun Rushi, who works in an Internet company in Xierqi, said, but she then added:

"The actual direction of the entire quarter has not been determined, because OKR is not even watched and can be changed at any time."

The popularity of OKR has reached its peak in 2021 since it first landed in China's Internet giants in 2013. According to media statistics, two years ago, there were over 20 books related to OKR on the market, and over 500 courses on knowledge payment platforms, almost to the point where enterprise management must call it OKR. The Baidu index also reached its peak this year.

However, since then, the popularity of OKR has begun to fade, and Baidu's search index has also decreased year by year, with more and more roast coming.

The ByteDance that was the first to implement the OKR system in China was the first to change slightly. There was a billboard inside the byte that specifically monitored the situation of employees filling in OKR. Since 2020, the OKR filling rate has continued to decline.

Starting from 2021, the OKR Improvement Department of Byte Management Research Institute, which specializes in researching the company's OKR usage, will no longer require employees in this department to set OKRs. I also asked several Tiktok employees who are still on the job, and the other party said that they have stopped writing OKR.

In February 2023, ByteDance will issue a letter to all staff, changing the bimonthly OKR to quarterly OKR. The management explained that it is because ByteDance's business is relatively mature now and there is not a significant bimonthly change, so the review cycle can be longer. But what is reflected behind it is a cognitive refresh of the OKR effect from top to bottom.

An employee of a large factory once complained about OKR on the Internet, "The daily work is not so painful, the real pain is that when writing OKR, I really hate to quit."

When she first joined the company, her supervisor even set him an O (goal) that had nothing to do with work: a goal of losing 5 kilograms per month - of course, this goal was not achieved.

Employees of another Internet company in Xierqi said to the "Zhengu Research Office" that the OKR system is almost non-existent in their department. Although HR still routinely urges the review and formulation of OKR every quarter, many people copy and paste it to get things done.

The employee claimed that because the OKR content can be changed at any time, they always write a few notes to cope with when formulating it, and then revise it to the content they can achieve during the quarterly review. "Although the company policy states that OKR can be completed without 100% completion, who knows, if I have to be laid off someday, it may also get stuck with me."

The level of emphasis on OKR within a certain AI company has also changed compared to before. An employee expressed that when he first arrived, he was worried about how to write an OKR. The mentor (an old employee responsible for assisting new employees within the company) told him that the purpose of writing this was to be determined. Now he often uses domestically produced ChatGPT to cope with the review and formulation of OKRs - at least increasing the daily activity of these products.

In terms of pulse, some employees unilaterally roast that leaders would not write OKR, and wrote the content that should be the goal (O) "leading the platform to experience intergenerational change" into the key result (KR). In theory, KR should be a result with quantifiable standards. In the vote for this post, over 120 people, nearly 70% of them, believed that this practice was "unreasonable".

From management tools to KPI for Chinese countryside

OKR not only lacks a sense of existence, but also gradually colludes with KPI, becoming synonymous with KPI and even being dubbed as "Chinese Rural KPI".

OKR and KPI should be two different things. KPI is a mandatory performance tool, but OKR is goal oriented, not a performance tool.

Most of the OKR systems implemented by China's Internet giants are modeled on Google. The book "Redefining the Company: How Google Operates" summarizes several characteristics of Google's OKR system that differ from KPIs:

1、 A complete OKR requires both setting big goals and developing key results that are easy to measure.

2、 A reasonable OKR should not only be realistic, but also have a certain level of difficulty and challenge, and should not be completed 100%. According to Google's internal statistics, completing 70% of OKR is a relatively ideal data.

3、 The OKR system is almost universally available and transparent, allowing even the lowest level employees to see the CEO's OKR.

4、 OKR requires scoring, but scores are not subject to assessment. The only purpose is to enable employees to honestly evaluate their performance.

According to Lazlo Bock, Google's head of human resources, OKR only accounts for one-third or even lower of Google's performance evaluations.

OKR itself does not fully represent performance, but Internet enterprises have made a patch to the OKR system: 360 environmental impact assessment. In addition to your self-evaluation, your superiors, peers, and subordinates will all rate your performance.

But due to poor promotion and implementation, many employees in China have not felt the difference between the two, or mistakenly believe that the two are similar tools. A large factory employee said that OKR is like a KPI with a shell on it, but the assessment still remains unchanged.

Well known talk show actor Hulan also used jokes to roast about Chinese OKR.

Many people may not know what OKR is, but it is actually similar to KPI. KPI is the indicator, OKR is the goal.

What's the difference then? Have you ever seen Zhao Benshan's abduction? It's difficult for Fan Wei to accept selling the wheelchair directly. You have to tell him that your goal is to keep your feet off the ground, and he thought about getting into a wheelchair.

Our company is like this.

Originally (the company) said: Hulan, you should strive to write a new joke every day this year.

I said: How could this be possible!

After a while, the company said: "You want to strive to win the championship this year.".

I said, "Oh, this is great.".

The company says: What should you do to win the championship?

I said: Write a new joke every day!

The introduction of OKR by Internet giants is partly aimed at eliminating the performance-based doctrine that leads to the disease of large enterprises, that is, the KPI only theory that strongly binds the goal with the evaluation and directly links the performance with the remuneration. But due to the need to assess performance, almost everyone puts forward easily achievable goals, resulting in employees only looking at immediate benefits, and even internal competition within the company, losing the spirit of challenge.

But from the current situation, OKR has not achieved this goal. An employee of an Internet company in Houchang Village, Haidian, Beijing, said that he often encountered prevarication and perfunctory when communicating across departments or even just across groups. Once, he almost quarreled with his colleagues, who directly said, "It's none of my business, it's not my OKR.".

This is similar to what Sony's former executive director, Yuichiro Tenwai, described. In 2007, he published an article in the media titled "Performance oriented ruining Sony", stating that it led to "business departments tearing apart each other and trying their best to profit from the overall interests of the company for their own departments."

"The original intention of OKR was good, but the execution was crooked," said an employee of a factory located in Wangjing, Beijing, regarding the alienation of OKR.

In just ten years, OKR seems to have gone from being loved by everyone to being disliked by everyone in China.

OKR is not only in China, but also in foreign countries where many foreigners are dissatisfied. On the famous foreign programmer website Hacker News, a netizen shared interesting stories about OKR.

For a period of time, I had an OKR to reduce the loading time of web pages. I don't know where this OKR came from, it's ridiculous because the webpage loading speed is not slow, and there is no reason to suggest that it can help the product. But we still managed to achieve it by compressing the image quality very low. The management was very satisfied and even ordered a cake to celebrate.

In the next quarter, customers began to complain about low image quality, so we set a new OKR to increase image quality by 50%. The method is to roll back to before the modification in the previous quarter. So we won completely again.

The netizen said that this situation lasted for a whole year, causing him to start doubting his life and have to resign. From now on, whenever anyone mentions the word OKR, he will know PTSD.

This is not an isolated case. According to The Information, a well-known paid technology reporting website, before Google's performance reform in 2022, nearly half (47%) of Google employees believed that the performance evaluation system was a waste of time.

Google has streamlined its performance evaluation system and launched the GRAD system (Google Reviews and Development, which focuses on evaluating employee influence), to some extent, downplaying the role of OKR.

One OKR, half of the management history

Whether at home or abroad, employee management is a thorny but hard nut to crack.

Modern management theory was born in the early 20th century. The scientific management theory proposed by management scholar Frederick Winslow Taylor believed that the most efficient and profitable organization should be dictatorship. Henry Ford, the founder of Ford, is also a fan of this theory.

But by the 1950s, this "scientific" management theory was no longer appropriate. Another management master proposed a new management concept: humanized result driven management.

In his view, it is important to trust and respect employees, rather than just treating them as profit making machines. Management should fully utilize individual abilities and a sense of responsibility, establish a common vision and direction, and establish a spirit of teamwork. In "The Practice of Management," Drucker referred to this concept as "management by objectives.".

In the 1960s, many companies adopted Drucker's "goal management", with the most famous being HP. In the famous HP Way, goal management is an important component.

But goal management also has its own flaws. The goal is conveyed layer by layer after the top-level design, which is prone to rigidity and deformation. Due to the lack of updates, it gradually fades over time. The Chinese internet slang is "going too far, to the point of forgetting why and starting.". Moreover, goal management is linked to employee salaries, bonuses, and promotions, which means that employees will not take risks at all.

In 1971, Intel, which had just been established for three years, introduced target management, but made some adjustments based on it and named it iMBO, which is a "target management system with Intel's characteristics." Famous investor John Dole later joined Intel and became a follower of this management system. After leaving Intel, he still preached this management method everywhere and called it OKR.

In the 1970s, American management expert Obray Daniels proposed the concept of "performance management". Systematic performance evaluation tools such as KPI were widely applied, and companies officially combined performance with employee compensation, job levels, and other indicators.

In other words, OKR and KPI appear at similar times. But obviously, performance evaluations that tend to view employees as "cattle and horses" have received more support. At the beginning of this century, one-third of American companies used performance evaluation, and 60% of Fortune 500 companies adopted a mandatory ranking system.

But what makes OKR truly well-known is the implementation of Google. John Dole brought OKR to Google. Google founder Larry Page once said that OKR has helped Google achieve tenfold growth.

In 2013, the newly established ByteDance introduced this foreign advanced experience and fully implemented it internally. Some media said that "the reason for the explosive growth of 100000 employees working efficiently with ByteDance" was the adoption of OKR system.

The tight curse of working people is not just OKR

As foreign advanced management experience, OKR is not only introduced into China, but also a key word that frequently appears in Internet giants: flexible working system.

OKR and flexible work system are essentially part of the performance evaluation system. Like OKR, flexible work has gone through a process from being a tool to being despised, leaving workers trapped in shackles.

But the birth of "flexible work system" is actually full of the brilliance of human nature. HP founder David Packard once said, "Flexible work is the essence of respecting and trusting people."

The flexible work system entered China even earlier than OKR. In 2007, Beijing began attempting to implement a flexible work system. In the same year, Procter&Gamble became one of the earliest companies in China to implement flexible work arrangements, and subsequently IT companies such as Lenovo and NEC adopted flexible work arrangements.

Not clocking in at work has become one of the typical characteristics of Internet companies.

But this system, which was originally designed to facilitate the work of migrant workers, gradually got played with like many other systems. Flexible work system, only showing off hours and not showing on hours, resulting in overtime and 996 violations.

Give an example. In 2017, an executive from Alipay joined Alibaba Cultural Entertainment. As soon as he took office, the executive realized that there was no "Alibaba flavor" here, and the employees would leave work on time. "Today we had a meeting and talked about 12 o'clock. If you come tomorrow at 12 o'clock, it won't work for us." Under his leadership, even if the employees worked until midnight the first day, they still managed to arrive at 9 o'clock the next morning.

In 2023, an Alibaba executive visited a core business line office area at the Hangzhou headquarters multiple times to check attendance. He found that the clock in time had passed, but some workstations were still empty. The executive began to strictly enforce attendance throughout the entire business line.

The roast of migrant workers about flexible working system are nurtured in a "theorem": a company must be on the decline if it starts to emphasize attendance and clock in.

The decline of OKR and flexible working system represents the end of the golden age of Internet in China. At the moment when growth is stalling, the Internet giant, which has been growing savagely for more than ten years, is experiencing challenges different from the past for the first time.

The big factories tightened their belts and also tightened the tight hoops on the heads of the workers.

This article is from WeChat official account: Zhengulab Research Office (ID: zhengulab), author: Feng Nuo, editor: Gong Zheng