As a startup founder, you're always thinking about how to align your team, track progress, and achieve your goals more efficiently.
One of the most important aspects of implementing OKRs is deciding how much visibility your team should have into the goals and metrics set at various levels.
You might ask yourself:
Should all my startup’s OKRs be shared openly across the company?
A bigger question is:
Should every team member know what every other team member is working on, and should all company-wide OKRs be visible to everyone?
In this article, we’ll break down the pros and cons of openly sharing OKRs across your startup and help you decide what’s best for your business.
The Benefits of Sharing OKRs Openly
1. Increased Transparency and Alignment
When everyone in the company knows the big picture goals, it creates a sense of alignment across teams. Each employee understands how their individual objectives contribute to the company’s overall success.
This transparency ensures that everyone is working towards common goals, eliminating confusion and silos.
For example, if your sales team is aware of your marketing team’s OKRs, they can coordinate efforts to achieve shared objectives, such as targeting the same audience or launching campaigns with complementary goals.
By having this visibility, it becomes easier to stay aligned, improve collaboration, and ensure accountability.
Recommended reading: Team vs. Personal OKRs: What’s Best for Your Startup?
2. Promotes a Culture of Accountability
When goals are visible to everyone, it naturally increases accountability.
Your team members know that their progress will be seen by others, which often drives higher levels of commitment and motivation to meet their objectives.
This is particularly important in a startup environment, where every employee’s contribution can have a direct impact on success.
Openly shared OKRs can spark healthy competition, foster a sense of responsibility, and help the team stay focused on results.
Plus, it’s easier for leaders to identify roadblocks early and provide the necessary support to keep things on track.
3. Fosters a Sense of Ownership and Engagement
When employees see how their work fits into the broader company goals, they’re more likely to feel engaged and invested in the outcome.
Being aware of how their OKRs tie into the company’s vision helps them understand their role in the bigger picture and gives them a sense of ownership over the company's growth.
At a startup, where each team member plays a significant role, fostering this sense of ownership can have a massive impact on both performance and morale.
4. Helps Identify Cross-Team Opportunities
By sharing OKRs openly, your team can identify opportunities for collaboration across different functions.
A product team may see that the customer support team has a goal to improve customer satisfaction scores and can collaborate on improving product features based on customer feedback.
When goals are shared transparently, teams can avoid working in isolation and can instead work together toward common objectives that drive business growth.
And that’s the point of OKRs, right?
Well…
The Potential Drawbacks of Sharing OKRs Openly
1. Overwhelming for New Team Members
For new team members, having access to all the OKRs across the company might feel overwhelming. It may be difficult for them to understand how their role fits into the big picture, or they may get distracted by objectives that don’t directly affect them.
It’s important to consider how much information new team members should have early on.
You may want to focus their attention on their specific objectives at first and gradually introduce them to broader company-wide goals as they become more familiar with the startup's culture and structure.
2. Sensitive Information or Strategic Risk
While OKRs are meant to be transparent, some goals may involve sensitive information or be part of a strategic initiative that is best kept within a smaller group.
For example, your company’s financial goals, fundraising targets, or competitive strategies might be better kept private or shared only with certain departments or leadership teams.
In such cases, it’s important to filter the information appropriately and only share what’s relevant to specific teams or individuals to avoid miscommunication or risk exposure.
3. Not All OKRs Are Relevant to Everyone
Your team members don’t necessarily need to see every single OKR.
For example, a marketing team's OKRs around content strategy or SEO may not directly impact the goals of your engineering team or sales team.
It’s important to think about which OKRs are most relevant for each department and role, and make sure that employees are not overwhelmed by irrelevant information.
Sharing only the most pertinent OKRs across teams can help keep employees focused on the tasks that are directly related to their work, avoiding information overload.
4. Potential for Misalignment or Confusion
If OKRs are shared across the company without proper context, it could lead to misalignment.
For instance, if a team doesn’t understand how their objectives align with the company’s overall strategy, it could lead to confusion or efforts that don’t directly contribute to key priorities.
In such cases, there’s a risk that some teams may focus on the wrong goals, leading to wasted time and resources.
It’s important that context and communication go hand-in-hand with sharing OKRs. Ensure that everyone understands the purpose behind each objective and how it fits into the broader company strategy.
How to Decide Whether to Share OKRs Across the Company
At the end of the day, whether or not you should share your startup OKRs openly depends on the culture and structure of your company.
If transparency, collaboration, and accountability are core values, sharing OKRs widely could be extremely beneficial.
However, it’s important to filter and tailor the visibility of goals to the needs of each department or individual.
Here are some factors to consider:
- What information is necessary for employees to perform their best?
- Is there any sensitive or confidential information that should remain private?
- Do team members understand the company’s overall goals, or do they need more context?
- How can you make sharing OKRs a tool for collaboration, not confusion?
Conclusion
Should all your startup’s OKRs be shared openly across the company?
In most cases, yes, sharing OKRs fosters transparency, accountability, and alignment.
However, not all OKRs need to be universally visible.
Consider the relevance, sensitivity, and clarity of each goal, and make sure that employees are equipped with the context they need to understand how their work contributes to the overall success of the company.
Ultimately, a balanced approach - where some OKRs are shared openly and others are kept private or specific to certain teams - can create a system that benefits everyone, helping your startup achieve its goals more effectively.
Ready to implement OKRs in your startup? Start by choosing OKR software that makes it easy to track and align your goals across the team.
Sign up for OKRs Tool to easily track, share, and align your goals with the right level of transparency for your startup.
