Today, I was discussing the topic of digital management tools with a foreign friend from one of the world's top emerging software companies abroad. I asked him if he uses OKR?
He said that his company does not recognize the practice of OKR, and they also know that OKR is a very popular management tool in technology companies. However, company leaders believe that OKR will increase competition and internal friction within the organization, destroy the collaborative culture, and is not conducive to mobilizing employees' work enthusiasm.
I asked them what digital tools the company uses to motivate employees? He said tools like employee engagement surveys and pulse surveys. As long as employees are happy, work can be done well. Regarding employee engagement surveys and digital applications of engagement management, I have written about them in the past articles "Engagement Management | Using Artificial Intelligence to Detect Organizational Sentiment" and "Enterprise Software | Why a Research Platform is Worth $8 Billion", so I won't repeat them here.
I thought about it carefully and found that OKR and engagement management are based on two different assumptions about human nature - especially in the highly uncertain environment that Internet companies are in. In order to continue to innovate and stimulate organizational vitality, the management behavior of enterprises must be based on the understanding of human nature.
The core concepts of OKR are "alignment" and "transparency". The organizational problems it solves are: first, the problem of "misalignment". There are ideas at the top but not execution at the bottom, and there is no horizontal collaboration. Regardless of KPI or OKR, I always think they are the same thing, they are all decomposition. Responsibility goals, and chasing after employees to see if this is the way to achieve them. Secondly, because some people in the organization are lazy and some are lazy, so everyone is allowed to show off their work results and work progress in the form of OKRs. This is actually the same as Amoeba's original intention. "OKR and Amoeba: Seeking the Original Meaning of Tools"
The human nature assumption for implementing engagement management is: human nature is good and positive, and it is also assumed that people have basic communication, collaboration, logical thinking, and result-oriented abilities. On this basis, managers care about what everyone really thinks and what makes them unhappy at work, and strive to eliminate these negative factors of engagement.
So, my conclusion is that in order to achieve organizational goals:
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OKR It is an externally driven tool
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Engagement is a self-driving tool
Chinese-style OKR management and point-based management of airport advertising have the same management philosophy. ""Point-based management" that does not conform to contemporary management theory"
Although some Silicon Valley companies regard "employing adults" as the top priority of their human resources strategy, it is difficult for Chinese business bosses to regard employees as adults and do not trust employees' self-motivation - or employees' self-motivation is indeed not worthy of trust. Popular descriptions of management philosophy in Chinese society, whether "horse racing or horse racing" or "people are faced with things," all coincide with the "underlying logic" of OKR (but I have always thought that the term "underlying logic" is a bad sentence).
In such a social environment, of course, business bosses would rather believe in OKR than engagement; the digital tools for engagement management that are popular in Western companies in the fields of talent management, organizational management, etc. are difficult to implement in China.
Machine-translated from the Chinese original 很难做系列 ｜ 为啥敬业度管理在中国很难做？ (published 2021-10-15). WeChat original ↗