The original vision of New Work, as introduced by Frithjof Bergmann in the 1980s, was revolutionary: dividing work into three equal parts—earning money, covering the cost of living, and pursuing passions. Yet, in practice, this vision has significantly shifted. Today, the term New Work symbolizes flexible working conditions, autonomy, collaboration, and self-organization.
While these ideals offer freedom, they also blur boundaries, leading to increased complexity, distractions, and a greater entanglement of work and personal life. For some, this manifests as endless meetings, work hours bleeding into private time, and the overwhelming nature of modern collaboration. Many find themselves echoing a common frustration:
“I don’t have time to do my actual work.”
Or
“We are never able to reach our goals because we do not have enough resources”
The inability to meet goals due to limited resources often results in stress, fatigue, and burnout.
OKRs: A Double-Edged Sword?
Twelve years ago, when I first started working with OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and later became an OKR expert and coach, I never associated the methodology with improving employee wellbeing. Many others, however, saw OKRs as a path to workplace happiness. While aligning my work with a strong vision and purpose will undoubtedly help to understand my contribution and “why this makes sense” - however the core purpose of OKRs is not to promote wellbeing, it’s to turn strategy into actionable results.
When done right, OKRs highlight organizational tensions, prioritize focus, and surface areas that need attention. But what happens when OKRs are misaligned or poorly implemented?
Balancing Ambition and Burnout
I’ve worked with teams that set highly ambitious OKRs, reaching only a few each quarter but still achieving significant impact and acceptance across the organization. Conversely, I’ve seen other teams where the same approach led to frustration, diminished motivation, and a loss of belief in OKRs.
The difference? Three critical factors: culture, mindset, and communication.
- Culture: A supportive environment where failure is seen as a learning opportunity helps teams embrace ambitious goals.
- Mindset: Teams must view OKRs as a tool for exploration, change and progress, not as rigid benchmarks for success.
- Communication: Emphasizing the impact of work rather than just OKR completion rates keeps morale high.
Organizations unprepared for these shifts often struggle, and implementing OKRs without addressing underlying cultural and mindset issues can lead to failure. Changing a company’s culture and mindset is a long process, often requiring years of consistent effort.
Striking the Right Balance with OKRs
From an OKR perspective, balance is key:
- Mix achievable and ambitious goals: A combination of realistic and "moonshot" objectives is healthy. If you are coming from a culture where teams are rather unprepared for ambitious goals and they tend toward setting easily achievable targets, prioritizing short-term wins, trying to avoid the discomfort of potential failure, then try to set a rule setting just one moonshot-type OKR per quarter. Start easy and see how the team reacts.
- Focus on impact, not scores: Talk more about impact made instead of final OKR scorings. If you are a big fan of these scorings and need a kind of benchmark – a 60–70% annual achievement rate across all OKRs is o.k.
- Avoid overcomplicating categories: Instead of splitting or tagging goals into "committed" or "ambitious," aim for a culture where 100% of OKRs are aspirational, with essential commitments handled separately – meaning “reaching budget” KRs don't add any value, as the team anyway knows what the budget is and why we should reach it.
- Leverage retrospectives: Extract key learnings at the end of each OKR cycle ( both quarterly and yearly) to refine your approach. Back to the previous point: it’s the best learning effect to have a finding in your retro that a your last “committed KR” did not make a difference and the teams wants to avoid these formulations in the future.
- Turn resource constraints into constructive discussions: When resource limitations are simply a given fact, use them as a springboard for conversations about “what is needed to make us a bit more confident”, “what is blocking us most” or " what should we stop doing"
OKRs and Psychological Health
So, are OKRs causing burnout and fatigue? The answer is no—not inherently. Are OKRs a tool for improving workplace mental health? Again, no.
OKRs are a framework for executing strategy through focus and collaboration. Their value lies in aligning teams around outcomes and enabling better conversations about priorities.
That said, psychological stress in modern work environments is real. While OKRs aren’t designed to solve these issues, organizations can implement complementary practices to reduce stress and improve wellbeing.
Tips to Reduce Workplace Stress
- Simplify routines: Review meetings and ceremonies; eliminate anything unnecessary.
- Prepare for meetings: Always have an agenda, desired outcomes, and action items. No meeting if there is no agenda and no clear purpose of the meeting.
- Block focus time: Reserve daily periods where employees can work uninterrupted. Make this a team rule.
- Shorten meeting durations: Aim for 50-minute meetings to allow breaks between calls.
- Use a buddy system: Ensure every task has a backup person and clear documentation, so employees can take uninterrupted vacations.
- Build trust: You hired your team for a reason—empower them to deliver.
- Have regular feedback talks: Separate quarterly discussions into work-related and personal wellbeing check-ins.
Final Thoughts
OKRs remain a powerful tool for translating strategy into action. Their true value comes not from reducing stress but from fostering focus, alignment, and meaningful progress. OKRs must be adopted to your culture and how you work and operate.