Strategy Week: The Power of OKRs

We’re always looking for better ways to achieve our goals – from truly understanding what diversity in digital marketing means and how to achieve it to innovating our practices with AI and ML technology. But with so many projects going on at once, we wanted to find a way to make sure they all aligned with the agency’s main goals. To help us do this, we introduced the OKRs scheme.

OKRs were brought into Tug’s way of working earlier on this year. Essentially, every quarter each and every Tug staff member will set three main goals (or “Objectives”) they’d like to complete. Attached to each objective is a handful of actions (or “Key Results”) that’ll help them achieve these goals. And when we say everyone in the agency has OKRs – we mean everyone. From our junior staff right through to the C-suite team, all of us have OKRs we’re working towards throughout each quarter.

So that’s the simple definition sorted, now, how does this help employees align their projects to the agency’s main goals and ambitions? Each quarter, the agency sets key themes, which employees are encouraged to explore through their own personal OKRs. This results in a holistic approach to key agency targets.

For the last quarter of the year, Tug’s main themes will focus on the following:

Tools and technology – we’ll focus on continuing to drive innovation, assessing both the tools that we use and those we’ve developed. We’ve already developed a suite of Tug Tools, and are starting to work on even more thanks to our focus on AI/ML throughout the last quarter. All of this ultimately helps us create a unique offering for our clients, pushing performance and gaining insights in new and innovative ways.

Client results – as a results-driven agency, our focus will always revolve around how our work performs for clients. This quarter, we’re planning on taking this a step further. On top of ensuring our services achieve the right results for clients, we’ll also be looking into how these results impact clients’ businesses more generally, and how we can maximise the positive impact our services have. Ultimately, we don’t just want to hit targets, we want to expand the impact hitting these targets has.

Tug culture – the best thing about working for Tug is the people. We want to preserve and elevate the culture within the agency, and make sure everyone’s happy and satisfied with their work life. Therefore, this quarter we’ll be focusing on making the culture at Tug as great as possible – increasing the amount of socials, adding work perks like free lunches and breakfasts, and facilitating time together face-to-face with core agency days.

As we dive into the next quarter, we’re excited to see how our focus on tools, tech, client impact, and nurturing our lively culture will help better the agency. Stay tuned for further OKR updates!