The following article comes from Zhengu Research Office, author Feng Nuo

Zhengu Research Office.

Real problems, more commercial

本文授权转载自微信公众号Zhengu Research Office (ID:zhengulab）

wrote an article| Von Nuo

edit| Gong Zheng

OKR (Objectives and Key Results), or "Goals and Key Results", is a management system popular among major Internet companies. Formulating and reviewing OKR is a key word that many Internet companies cannot avoid every quarter.

In 2013, Byte introduced OKR for the first time in China, and then major Internet companies followed suit. Huawei, Tencent, Ali, Xiaomi, Baidu, Jingdong, Meituan, Pendoduo and many other major Internet companies, and even many traditional industries, began to absorb this. The essence of management from Silicon Valley. But now, many big factory people stop writing OKR. With growth expectations weakening, OKR is no longer a panacea at once.

From the former Britney Spears to the present Mrs. Niu

"I wrote all my boss's OKRs, and I pieced it together to determine the direction of the entire department for the next quarter." Xiao Sun, who works for an Internet company in Xierqi, said this, but she later added:

"The direction of the entire quarter is actually not determined because no one is watching OKR and can be changed at any time."

OKR's popularity has reached its peak in 2021 since it first landed in a major domestic Internet company in 2013. According to media statistics, two years ago, there were more than 20 OKR-related books on the market, and more than 500 courses on knowledge-paying platforms, almost to the point where business management must call it OKR. The Baidu index also reached its peak this year.

But since then, the popularity of OKR has begun to fade, and the Baidu search index has also decreased year by year, accompanied by more and more complaints.

ByteDance, the earliest implementation of the OKR system in China, took the lead in changing in subtle ways. There is a billboard inside the Byte that specifically monitors employees 'filling in OKR. Since 2020, the OKR filling rate has continued to decline.

Starting from 2021, the "OKR Improvement Department" of the Byte Management Research Institute, which specializes in studying the use of OKR in the company, will no longer force employees of the department to set OKR. I also asked several Douyin employees who were still working, and they said that they no longer wrote OKR.

In February 2023, ByteDance issued a letter to all employees, changing bimonthly OKR to quarterly OKR. The management explained that it is because Byte's business is relatively mature now, the bimonthly changes are not obvious, and the review period can be longer. But what is reflected behind it is the "cognitive refresh" of the role of OKR from top to bottom.

An employee of a large factory once complained about OKR on the Internet,"Every day's work is not so painful. What is really painful is that when writing OKR, it really makes me hate it so much that I want to resign."

When she first joined the job, the leader even set him O (i.e. goal) that had nothing to do with her work:The goal of losing 5kg a month-of course, this goal has not been achieved.

Employees of another Internet company in Xierqi told the "Zhenggu Research Office" that the OKR system is almost no longer in name in their department. Although HR still routinely urges the review and formulation of OKR every quarter, many people copy and paste it and do it hastily.

The employee said that because the content of OKR can be changed at any time, he always wrote a few random items when formulating it, and then revised it to what he could achieve during the quarterly review. "Although the company's regulations say that OKR can be completed less than 100%, who knows? If I want to be fired one day, I may also use this matter to block me."

The importance attached to OKR within a large AI factory has also changed compared with the past. One employee said that when he first arrived, he was worried about how to write OKR. The mentor (an old employee in the company who is responsible for helping new employees) told him that the use of writing this was to be determined. Now he often uses Chinese-made ChatGPT to cope with OKR reviews and formulation-at least increasing the daily activity of these products.

On the other hand, some employees unilaterally complained that leaders could not write OKR, and wrote the content "leading the platform to experience intergenerational change", which should clearly be the goal (O), as a key result (KR). In theory, KR should be a result with quantitative standards. In the vote for this post, more than 120 people, or nearly 70%, believed that this practice was "unreasonable."

From management artifacts to Chinese pastoral KPI

Not only has OKR become less and less of a sense of existence, but it has also gradually "colluded" with KPIs and has become synonymous with KPIs, and has even been dubbed "Chinese Pastoral KPI".

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

Most of the OKR systems implemented by China's major Internet companies follow Google's example. "Redefining the Company:The book "How Google Works" summarizes several characteristics that distinguish Google's OKR system from KPIs:

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

2. A reasonable OKR must not only be in line with reality, but also be difficult and challenging, and should not be 100% completed. According to Google's internal statistics, 70% of OKR completion is an ideal figure.

3. The OKR system is available to almost everyone and is open and transparent. Employees at the lowest level can also see the CEO's OKR.

4. OKR needs to be scored, but the scores are not assessed. The only purpose is to allow employees to honestly judge their performance.

根据谷歌的人力资源负责人拉兹洛·博克的说法，OKR accounts for only one-third or less of Google's performance reviews.

OKR itself does not fully represent performance, but Internet companies have still put a patch on the OKR system:360 Environmental Assessment. In addition to your self-evaluation, your superiors, peers and subordinates will rate your performance.

但因为宣贯和执行不利，国内很多员工并没有感受到两者的差异，或者误认为两者是差不多的工具。一名大厂员工表示， OKR is like a KPI in a shell, but the assessment is still different.

** **

Well-known talk show actor Hulan also used jokes to complain about Chinese-style OKR.

Many people may not know what OKR is, but it is actually similar to a KPI. KPI is an indicator and OKR is a goal.
What's the difference? Have you seen Zhao Benshan selling crutches? If you want to sell the wheelchair directly to Fan Wei, it will be very difficult for him to accept it. You have to tell him that your goal is to get your feet off the ground, and he thinks he's going to sit in a wheelchair.
This is what our company is like.
Ben (company) said:Hulan, try to write a new paragraph every day this year. I said:How is this possible! After a while (the company) said:This year you want to win the championship. I said:Oh, this is good. company said:What should you do to win the championship? I said:Write a new paragraph every day!

互联网大厂引入OKR，Part of the purpose is to eliminate the performance-based theory that causes the disease of large enterprises, that is, the KP-only theory that strongly binds goals and evaluations and directly links performance and remuneration. 但因为要考核业绩，几乎所有人都提出容易实现的目标，导致员工只看眼前的利益，企业内部甚至互相拆台，失去挑战精神。

But judging from the current situation, OKR has not achieved this goal. An employee of an Internet company located in Houchang Village, Haidian, Beijing, said that when communicating across departments or even groups, he often encountered prevarication and perfunctory. Once, he almost got into a quarrel with a colleague, and the other person directly said,"It's none of my business, it's not my OKR."

This is "similar to what Sony described by former managing director of Sony Corporation, Siro Tanwai." In 2007, he published an article in the media **"Performanceism Destroyed Sony"**, saying that it led to "business departments undermining each other and trying every means to gain more benefits for the department from the overall interests of the company."

"OKR had good intentions, but its execution was crooked." Regarding the alienation of OKR, an employee at a factory in Wangjing, Beijing said this.

仅仅十年，OKR in China seems to have changed from the beloved Britney Spears to the disliked Mrs. Niu.

** **

OKR is not only dissatisfied in China, but also many foreigners abroad. On Hacker News, a well-known foreign programmer website, a netizen shared an interesting story about OKR.

For a while, I had an OKR that reduced the loading time of web pages. This OKR came out of nowhere, but it's outrageous because web pages don't load slowly and there's no reason why it can help the product. But we did it anyway by compressing the image to a very low quality. The management was very satisfied and even ordered a cake to celebrate.

As a result, the next quarter, customers started complaining about low picture quality, so we set up a new OKR to improve picture quality by 50%. way is:Roll back to the previous quarter before the modification. So we won again.

The netizen said that this situation lasted for a whole year, causing him to begin to doubt his life and had to resign. From then on, whenever anyone mentioned the word OKR, he would learn 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.

谷歌为此精简了绩效评估系统，推出了GRAD system（Google Reviews and Development，即关注员工影响力的评价），在某种程度上，是淡化了OKR的作用。

An OKR, half a management history

Whether at home or abroad, employee management is a difficult but hard nut that has to be cracked.

现代管理理论诞生于20世纪初，管理学家弗里德里克・温斯洛・泰勒提出的科学管理理论，Believing that the most efficient and profitable organizations should be authoritarian 。福特汽车的开创者亨利・福特也是这种理论的拥趸。

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

在他看来，要对员工给予信任和尊重，而不是只把他们当作赚钱的机器。管理要充分发挥个人能力和责任感，建立共同的愿景和方向，建立团队合作精神。德鲁克在《管理的实践》中，将这种理念称为“ Target management”（MBO，management by objectives）。

In the 1960s, many companies adopted Drucker's "management by objectives", the most famous of which was Hewlett-Packard Company. In the famous "The HP Way", management by objectives is an important part.

But management by objectives also has its own problems. Goals are conveyed layer by layer after the top-level design. They are easy to become rigid and deformed. Due to the lack of updates, they will be slowly diluted over time. To use a Chinese online buzzword, it is "Go too far, I forget why and set out." Moreover, management by objectives is linked to employees 'wages, bonuses, and promotions, resulting in employees not taking risks at all.

In 1971, Intel, which had just been established three years ago, introduced objective management, but made some adjustments on this basis and named it iMBO, which is "an objective management system with Intel characteristics." Famous investor John Doerr later joined Intel and became a believer in this management system. After leaving Intel, he still preached about this management method everywhere and called it OKR.

差不多也是在20世纪70年代，美国管理学家奥布雷・丹尼尔斯提出了“performance management ”的概念，KPI等系统性绩效评估工具得到大范围应用，企业正式将绩效与员工薪酬、职级等指标结合。

In other words, OKRs and KPIs emerged at the same time. But clearly, performance evaluations that tend to view employees as "cows 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 it was its implementation at Google that made OKR a real household name. John Doerr brought OKR to Google. Google founder Larry Page once said that OKR helped Google achieve tenfold growth.

In 2013, the newly established ByteDance introduced this advanced foreign experience and fully implemented it internally. Some media said that "the reason why ByteDance's 100,000 employees work efficiently and have exploded" is the adoption of the OKR system.

The tightening curse of migrant workers is not just OKR

作为国外先进管理经验引入中国的，不只是OKR，还有一个频繁出现在互联网大厂的关键词里：Flexible working system.

OKR and flexible working system are essentially part of the performance appraisal system. Like OKR, flexible working systems have also gone from artifact to disgust, putting all migrant workers under shackles.

但“弹性工作制”的诞生，其实充满了人性的光辉。惠普创始人戴维·帕卡德曾表示：“Flexible working system is the essence of respecting and trusting people.”

Flexible working was introduced into China even before OKR. In 2007, Beijing began to try to implement flexible working systems. In the same year, P & G became one of the first companies to implement flexible working systems in China's workplace. Subsequently, IT companies such as Lenovo and NEC adopted flexible working systems one after another.

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

But this system, which was originally intended to make it easier for migrant workers to go to work, gradually became ruined like many systems. The flexible working system only plays off the off-duty hours and not the working hours, resulting in overtime and rampant 996.

Give an example. In 2017, an Alipay executive joined Alibaba Entertainment. As soon as he took up his new job, the executive discovered that there was no "Ali flavor" here and employees left work as soon as they arrived. "Today's meeting was held at 12 o'clock. I will come at 12 o'clock tomorrow. It won't work with us." Under his rule, even if employees worked until 12 a.m. the first day, they still got work at 9 a.m. the next morning.

Fig.| Flexible working may not be easy to mess with

In 2023, an Ali executive went to a core business line office area of the Hangzhou headquarters many times to check attendance. He found that the check-in time had passed, but some workstations were still empty. From then on, the executive began to strictly control the attendance of the entire business line.

打工人对于弹性工作制的吐槽，孕育在一个“定理”之中：As long as a company starts to emphasize attendance and check-in, it will definitely be on a decline.

** **

The decline of OKR and flexible working systems represents the end of the golden age of China's Internet. At a time when growth is stalled, the Internet giant factory that has experienced more than a decade of barbaric growth feels different from the past for the first time.

Big factories have tightened their belts, as well as the tightening spell on the workers.

-