Koan is more than just an OKR tool. We created Koan to give everyone in your team a seat at the table and make all voices heard. We encourage team autonomy when setting goals and giving every lead and contributor a dedicated space to talk through their insights about their goals.
But Koan is more than that-- our Reflections allow for teams to have deeper communication, faster knowledge-sharing, and better alignment, all while cutting down on meetings and keeping a record of the work being done. How can your team best leverage Koan? This guide will help you get the most from the platform,
Reflections
Your reflections shouldn’t feel like make-work or like you’re being micromanaged. This isn’t a place where your manager is tracking every meeting you had during the week. The goal of reflections is two-fold:
Share important updates about the work you’re doing on your goals and how they’re progressing.
Share information with the rest of your team to make sure that you’re all on the same page.
Reflections are private to members of your team, so they’re a perfect place to work through issues, share learnings, and commiserate with problems. Knowing that your audience for your reflection is your other team members should help you prioritize what information they’d need to know. Make great strides on your goals, all while advancing other projects? Include it in your reflection! Did your day-to-day work like normal? Probably not worth mentioning in the reflection.
Learn more about reflections here.
Reading reflections
As critical as writing your own reflection is reading your teammate's reflections. No one likes doing work that goes off into the void to be ignored. Plus, if everyone in your team is taking the time to share important updates, ask questions, or give learnings, they’ll be full of great information.
Make sure to give your team members feedback as well. React with emojis in-line, and leave comments where you can further dig into the information that was shared.
Custom questions
Your team can also create custom questions to increase the data collected by your weekly reflections.
At Koan, we highly suggest that you create custom reflection questions to maximize the value of reflections and to increase engagement for your team. There are two main ways we suggest you do this:
Create a team-specific reflection question that gathers project or department-specific data. This is typically a recurring question and function to help customize the reflection for your team's projects and needs. This question can be asking about a departmental win, a reflection on a specific project, etc.
Create one-time ice breaker questions that improve reflection engagement and increase team bonding. This is likely a series of one-time questions that you change on a weekly basis. Having fun or silly questions helps to alleviate the reflection experience and also motivates teammates to complete their reflections as well as to read and engage with teammates' reflections so that they can see their colleagues' answers.
Note: this isn’t the only way to use the data that you enter into Koan. You can also use it to have great team meetings. Check out our guide on that here.
Collaborate on goals
Naturally, any good OKR tool is going to help you work on your OKRs. Reflections are the vehicle for getting goal data that you can leverage to keep everyone working on the goal on track. Open the discussion tab of your key result to see all lead and contributor ratings, leave comments, or track the work that your teammates tagged. If you’re the lead on a key result, you can get more context from your teammates by leveraging reflections than you could by scheduling yet another meeting.
Learn more about how to dig into a goal here.
The best thing you can do in Koan is collaborate. Looking for more options for collaboration? Let us know by reaching out through the messenger in the lower right corner.