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Google enables GRAD, is it about to give up OKR?

Origin News

Producer | Lanxi

A few days ago, the technology media The Information published a report saying that Google will launch a new system, GRAD, this month to reduce the time and energy employees spend on performance appraisals.

This news was sent back to China and was quickly interpreted as “Google will abandon OKRs that have been used for 20 years and turn to GRAD”.

This is undoubtedly big news.

As a goal management system, OKR was pioneered by Intel and promoted by Google. It is said that the birth of classic products such as Gmail and Chrome browser are inseparable from OKR, which has also become famous with the soaring of Google’s brand value.

In the past ten years, OKR has not only swept Silicon Valley, but also affected many giant companies around the world. In China alone, there are fans such as Byte, Baidu, and Huawei.

Now that Google is going to abandon OKRs, isn’t it that the ancestors are going to leave the school?

Let’s start with the conclusion, “Google uses GRAD to innovate the performance appraisal system” is true, and “abandoning the use of OKRs” is a misunderstanding.

Half of employees are dissatisfied, promoting Google’s performance appraisal optimization

Throughout the news, 47% of Google employees believe that performance reviews are too cumbersome and a waste of time. This is tied with “lack of competitive pay” as the two biggest areas of dissatisfaction with the company in Google’s annual employee survey.

In order to prevent the loss of talents, Google, which does not consider the salary increase of all employees, chose to optimize the performance appraisal system, that is, enable GRAD to improve employee satisfaction.

Here it is necessary to understand Google’s current performance appraisal mechanism.

** To put it simply, the performance appraisal of Google employees is twice a year. In each evaluation, employees have to fill out a large number of forms, including comments from superior managers, comments from colleagues who have worked together, and their own work. content production, etc.

After collecting this comprehensive evaluation information, managers will conduct face-to-face performance talks with employees. If employees think that there are injustices, they can also apply for re-evaluation. **

Going down this series of processes means that employees have to allocate a lot of time, energy or workload every few months to demonstrate why they can get a raise and why they can be promoted. It is no wonder that in the eyes of nearly half of Google employees, the current performance appraisal has affected their normal work.

A Meta employee who compared the workflow of a colleague who jumped from Google gave this example:

A log statistics table data error, need to design the correct log statistics formula, generate a new table. This works fine, just need to read the standard of the raw data and write the correct formula into the code.

But the former Google employee wrote a several-page document that listed what the data in each column of the wrong table was, what data was actually needed, the meaning of each attribute of the original data, and what each column of the new table should be used for. formulas, etc.

In the opinion of this Meta employee, this inefficient way of working is one of the “inertia consequences” caused by Google’s performance appraisal mechanism.

Because Google’s promotion review emphasizes that the more responsible employees are for complex matters, the more they should be rewarded. Therefore, employees must fully demonstrate the complexity of their work, in order to show that their work is valuable, and then get promoted.

It is not difficult to see that, whether it is from the perspective of employees, so that employees can focus more on their actual work, or from the perspective of the company, to improve output efficiency and employee satisfaction, Google’s optimization of performance appraisal has become imperative. OK.

But what does all this have to do with OKRs?

OKR is only for goal management, not for performance appraisal

Equating “Google’s new GRAD system for performance appraisal optimization” and “Google abandoning the OKR system” is completely wrong - OKR is not a performance appraisal system.

In those companies that apply OKR, OKR is only a target management system, and 360 EIA is a performance appraisal tool.

The former is called Objectives and Key Results, that is, goals and key results. It is a target management system that guides the company, team and individual in the direction of progress

“KR” is the key result that needs to be accomplished in order to achieve “O” and needs to comply with the SMART principle, that is, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. For example, “increase 100% profit margin”.

OKR emphasizes top-down publicity communication and bottom-up alignment. Through the top-down dismantling goal O, set quantifiable work content KR to achieve bottom-up collaboration between individuals, teams and companies. Create and ensure that employees can adjust problems in a timely manner and do the right thing.

In order to ensure the smooth progress of OKRs, companies, teams and individuals must review and analyze after the end of each cycle to judge the completion of the goals, whether the goals are reasonable, and how to adjust them in the future. For example, some departments of ByteDance have to align OKRs once a month.

The so-called 360 EIA means that employees conduct self-evaluation, peer evaluation and subordinate evaluation according to the company’s requirements, collect information from multiple parties, and comprehensively make assessments for employees’ performance. decisive score.

For example, at Google, the 360 EIA also includes evaluation and self-assessment of Google’s spirit, leadership, execution, and presence.

A Google employee said, “The basis of the company’s assessment is not how many OKRs have been completed, but whether the work results in half a year can reflect the employees’ meeting the expectations of the current position level. I have seen many OKRs that have not been completed but have excellent performance, or A situation where OKRs are done but performance is mediocre.”

For example, an L5-level employee’s OKRs are all L4-level jobs, and his perfect OKR performance does not mean excellent performance, nor does it mean that he is qualified for promotion to L6 positions.

Another former employee of Byte also told me that the 360 EIA and OKRs in his department are not linked at all. In R&D, sales and other departments, performance appraisal does not look at how many OKRs have been completed, but on actual output, including quantitative data such as product DAU, revenue, and work to promote the implementation of an important project. Unquantifiable output, etc. .

Therefore, regardless of the theoretical scope of human resource management or the actual application scenarios of enterprises, OKR and performance management are not the same thing.

What is the relationship between GRAD and OKR?

The new system GRAD launched by Google is not only unrelated to OKR, nor does it replace the 360 EIA, but optimizes performance appraisal at the process level.

• Expectations, Feedback and Verification. In order to align on priorities, staff and management will be aligned on expectations, and there will be feedback and verification throughout the year. One of the checks will focus on employee learning and career development at Google. This is consistent with the implementation of OKR, emphasizing bottom-up communication and coordination between employees and management;
• Promotion, twice a year, we will continue to explore new ways to help Googlers advance their careers through internal promotion. This is consistent with the previous promotion mechanism of Google;
• Reviews and ratings, performance ratings will be conducted annually, and the new rating scale will reflect the actual impact of the day-to-day work of most Googlers.

This “3” is the point. First, the reduction of performance ratings from two to one per year theoretically directly halved the workload for employees and management to deal with performance appraisals.

At the same time, the decision-making power of promotion was returned to the promotion committee composed of senior management, and a new evaluation system was established to facilitate the management to score. and “insufficient influence”, making it clear that most Googlers are in the middle of “significant influence”.

These two things simplifies performance reviews for employees and managers who no longer need to fill out lengthy forms to justify their or each other’s work.

And all of this is to simplify the performance appraisal system and optimize the content items of the 360 EIA, so that employees can focus more on actual work.

So if it is necessary to say what is the relationship between Google’s GRAD and OKR, it should also be “Google enables GRAD optimization to simplify performance appraisal and allow employees to focus more on completing OKRs”.