After the pandemic, personal well-being and personal development have gained importance in the workplace. Personal development is one of the areas that have a great impact on how an individual performs at work and achieves his/her goals.
What is personal development?
Personal development is the process of achieving growth and fulfillment at a personal level by developing skills, knowledge, attitude, and positive behaviors. To achieve personal development, an individual needs to assess one’s qualities, attributes, lifestyle and life choices, identify the gaps and weak spots, make a conscious effort to address them, and set out to achieve improvement in all those areas. Ideally, these improvements not only help develop oneself personally, but also get reflected in work and career as well.
Areas of focus in personal development
Personal development may involve improving:
- Leadership qualities
- Communication skills
- Interpersonal skills
- Decision making
- Problem-solving
- Upskilling, training, and career development
- Physical health
- Mental well-being
- Stress management
- Work-life balance
- Creative thinking
- Emotional intelligence
- Time management
- Prioritizing and organization
- Financial Management
- Improve employee satisfaction
- And more
Seven ways personal development can impact work life
Achieving personal development not only makes personal life better but also has a great impact on how an individual excels in his/her professional life and career. Personal development helps individuals to work better and be more productive in several ways:
- Mindfulness and emotional intelligence help employees understand their own emotions. As a result, they can handle difficult situations better and improve their relationship with team members and colleagues. This promotes better communication, teamwork, and collaboration. In the long run, it creates a more positive work environment.
- Better communication skills, teamwork, and synergy with the team members enable the employees to engage with the team better, share their ideas, solve problems, and make better decisions collectively and at individual level. They help individuals become catalysts for the teams to produce better outcomes.
- Better problem-solving skills help employees stay level-headed during difficult situations and use their creativity better to come up with innovative solutions and workarounds, navigate complex problems, and overcome challenging situations with resolve.
- Better time management skills enable employees to prioritize tasks better, focus on the right tasks at the right time, and use available time judiciously to increase productivity and efficiency. This leads to consistency in achieving goals and producing results.
- Focusing on good health, reducing stress, and prioritizing mental well-being enable employees to focus on their work better, improve their energy levels and be productive.
- Personal development enables individuals to rediscover or reinforce their values and find their purpose in life. This translates into the ability to find their purpose in work and the clarity required to link personal goals to the organizational goals. As a result, personal development automatically leads to career growth.
- When individuals develop highly sought-after qualities of adaptability and flexibility, they can weather a rapidly changing work environment, adapt to changes and be at their productive best in a constantly evolving workplace for achieving better workplace happiness.
Personal OKRs – adapting OKRs for personal growth and career development
Objectives and Key Results (OKR) is a goal-setting framework for achieving uniformly aligned goal-setting across all levels of the organization, in line with the ambitious overall objectives of the organization. It helps organizations and employees overachieve and succeed by systematically working little by little to consistently produce outcomes that lead to the fulfillment of the objectives.
Personal OKRs are an adaptation of this framework at an individual level to set personal goals, track progress and measure achievements. Personal OKRs are used to set clear and measurable goals in line with long-term personal or career ambitions. They are then tracked through specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) key results. Personal OKRs help individuals stay focused, prioritize their efforts, and achieve personal and career growth.
A Step-by-step guide to achieving individual development with personal OKRs
You can set personal OKRs by asking yourself the following questions.
1. What is your purpose?
When you set out to start a project, some of the first things you will assess are the objectives and ambitions that you have, and the pain points and the problems that you will be addressing with your outcomes. You can apply the same while setting personal OKRs. So it is essential to stop thinking about the activities you want to do and focus on your ambitions first. You have to ask yourself:
- Which important things that you want to achieve.
- What you should prioritize.
- Why do you want to achieve something?
- What you want to become in the future.
- What pressing problems that you need to solve.
The answer to all these questions will help you get clarity and choose your important objectives, set your priorities, and create a roadmap of tasks that you need to carry out to achieve these objectives within a specific time. You can select specific areas of personal development as mentioned above. For instance, if you are a middle-aged salaried professional, you may want to focus on health and mental well-being. For that ambition, you can select your goals and targets, your priorities, the tasks required to become healthy and fit within a specific timeframe, and the means to track your progress.
2. What are your Objectives?
The OKR framework or approach in an organizational setup is designed in such a way that ambitious long-term objectives of the organization are broken down into achievable, shorter-duration goals and cascaded down to teams, which then filter down to individuals as goals to be attained in an even shorter duration.
Similarly, when you set personal OKRs, You can select an ambitious long-term mission, such as ‘creating multiple income streams within 5 years’, and then break it down into relatively shorter-term Objectives, such as ‘become a YouTuber with 1000 subscribers and start earning within 1 year’. To maintain focus and consistency, it is advisable to have a limited number of objectives.
3. What are your Key results?
Key results are linked to the objectives that you have chosen. They are specific, time-bound, difficult-to-achieve goals that need to be achieved in a short period, say a month. The achievement of these goals gradually adds up over some time and fulfills your objectives, and helps you move a bit further ahead toward your long-term mission. For example, for the aforementioned long-term objective, your key results can be, ‘open a youtube channel and get it operational within a week’, ‘Post at least six videos every month’, ‘earn 100 subscribers every month’, ‘monetize the channel within a year’, etc.
4. What are the means to attain your goals?
After having set objectives and key results, it is time to find the means to achieve them. You have to come up with specific, actionable initiatives, consisting of activities and tasks that will fulfill your goals. For instance, when your key result is to ‘open a youtube channel and get it operational within a week’, then your initiatives can include:
- Frame the objectives of your youtube channel.
- Decide the theme of your channel.
- Define your target audience.
- Find a clear, descriptive, SEO-friendly name for the channel that appeals to your audience.
- Find suitable keywords that suit your channel and the ones your audience is looking for.
- Write an SEO channel description.
- Create a youtube account, complete the profile, configure adwords, and link the bank account.
- Create a content calendar.
- Post your first video and take the channel public.
- Create visibility for your channel by posting on social media and asking your friends and family to spread the word.
How will you evaluate your achievements?
Evaluating your successes and quantifying your OKR achievements are crucial for implementing personal OKRs. Only when you can put a score on your successes and failures, can you verify progress, identify the limitations, and systematically achieve your overall objectives and your vision in the long run. You can score your 0KRs on a scale of 0 – 1.0 as follows.
| Grading interval | Status |
|---|---|
| 0 – 0.3 | Failure /No progress |
| 0.4 – 0.6 | Work in progress/moderate levels of success |
| 0.7 – 1.0 | Success |
6. Track your progress and follow-up
When you have long-term OKRs, it is essential to keep track of your progress and continuously follow up with the developments. This is important because it is possible to waver and lose focus or hit some roadblocks at some point of time. Only when you track your progress, can you identify how various factors contributed to the slow down, how you may have fallen behind in your journey, and how your initiatives are not delivering results. When you follow up with your OKRs, you can identify these factors and regain your focus and find alternative methods to reach your goals. Also, when you continuously measure and track your progress, you can also compare yourself against your past performance and see how you have improved, which provides you with great motivation to carry on with your journey towards your objectives and achieve personal growth.
Personal OKR goals examples
FAQs about Personal OKRs
1. What is an example of Personal OKR for individual development?
Setting a long-term career objective of ‘reaching a managerial position in 10 years’, setting yearly learning, upskilling, and leadership training goals to systematically gain competencies and qualifications required for a managerial position, and planning monthly activities aligned to those goals can be an example of personal OKRs.
2. Can OKRs be used for individuals?
OKRs can be used to set ambitious personal and career goals and track the progress against those goals. They can help you achieve ambitious goals at the personal level.
3. What are personal OKRs?
Personal OKRs are an adaptation of the OKR goal-setting framework, which is used by organizations to align employees to the objectives and systematically fulfill them through overachievement. Personal OKRs can be used by individuals to follow the same goal-setting method to achieve personal and career goals.