Planning your cycle
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      3. Planning your cycle

      OKRs and Goals Approval Workflow

      The OKRs and Goals Approval Workflow directly assists in the planning stage of the cycle, adding some steps to the flow of creating OKRs on the platform. With it, platform admins and leaders will be able to approve the objectives and projects created, as well as request revisions before the OKRs become “official”.

      In this material, we will address:

      • Existing and possible flows from the OKR creation process to the approval of the objective or project;

      • How to enable this functionality;

      • How to filter objectives by status (“pending submission”, “pending approval”, “pending review” and “approved”);

      • Does the OKR tier (individual, team, and company) change anything in the Workflow?;

      • FAQ.

      To learn more about platform permissions and impacts, refer to Permissions and platform impacts on Approval Workflow.

       

      Possible flows

      To better understand the flow, we will use the following example:

       

      Matheus is led by Admin Rocks and is creating goals for a cycle with Workflow enabled. In this case, the possible statuses for this objective will be.

       

      Pending Submission

      The standard OKR status as soon as it is created. Here, the person responsible for the OKR has not yet submitted the request for approval. The platform view is as follows 👇

      Pending Approval

      The OKR status after being submitted for approval. Here, the direct leader or platform admin needs to "approve" or "request revision".

       

      Direct report's screen

       

      Leader's screen

       

       

      Pending Revision

      Status after someone requests revision. The leader can add a comment specifying exactly what needs to be changed, and the OKR returns to its owner.

       

      Approved

      OKR status as soon as someone approves it.

       

      ✏️Note: These buttons are available on the goal details screen from the OKR listing.

       

      How to enable this feature

      This flow will only occur if the functionality is activated in the cycle. You can enable this functionality by going to the cycle management page and selecting the option highlighted below 👇

       

      ⚠️ Attention:

      • This setting cannot be disabled after it has been enabled for the cycle;

      • OKRs created before the enabling of the functionality are already categorized as “approved”;

      • OKRs created after the enabling of the functionality are created in the “pending submission” status.

         

      How to filter objectives by their status

      In the OKR product, you will find the following menu, where you can select the status you want to monitor.

       

      In addition to this view and tracking of OKRs, every day at 10:00 AM, leaders receive a digest email if the contribution to any OKR from at least one team member directly led by them is pending approval in the current cycle.

       

       

      OKR tier and the Approval Workflow

      The approval workflow is, essentially, a relationship between the team member (the one responsible for the objective) and their leader. In other words, the workflow does not depend on its tier, because the information it considers is the person responsible for a certain objective. People tasked with approving the OKR or project will always be the direct leader(s) of its owner (admin profiles and OKR admins will also be able to provide approval).

       

      ⚠️ Attention: If teams are contributors to the OKRs, there is a peculiarity in the approval. When the owner's contribution is approved, the team's contribution is also automatically approved. In this case, the contributing team’s leader receives an in-app notification telling them of the approval.

      As an example, consider the context below:

      • Laura is responsible for the goal Reduce median time to close;

      • Arya Stark is Laura's leader;

      • The CS team is listed as a contributor in the objective Reduce median time to close;

      • The leader of the CS team is John Snow.

      In this scenario:

      • Laura is the one who can submit the objective for approval;

      • Arya Stark is the one who can approve the objective (the leader of the person responsible for the objective);

      • John Snow is the one who will receive the notification of approval (the leader of the contributing team);

      • The objective will appear as approved within the team's OKR page.

       

      FAQ

      What if instead of adding a team as a contributor I add individual contributors as contributors?

      In this case, each contributor must send the request for approval to their leaders and the respective leaders are responsible for approving or requesting a revision.

       

      How do cycles that do not have the Workflow configuration enabled work?

      In cycles without activated workflow, all OKRs are launched with the “approved” status. In other words, if you activate the workflow in a cycle that has existing OKRs, these are interpreted by the system as already approved.

       

      Is it possible to edit the OKRs after they have been approved?

      If the person responsible for an approved OKR wants to edit it, they can only do so if their direct leader or admin has enabled editing (done within the objectives menu). When an OKR is open for editing, the owner can edit any part of it, but cannot delete it. It is important to emphasize that allowing the editing of an OKR does not change its status, which is to say that the OKR will remain approved.

      If you have any doubts, #ChatWithUs.