When I first started working with OKRs i.e. Objectives and Key Results in a People and Operations context, I approached it quite differently. I’d write things like “Implement HRMS” or “Run onboarding for all new hires” and call them objectives. They looked productive and clear on a slide, but they were really just to-do lists gimmicking OKRs.
It took a few years of experience across hypergrowth startups, a full-scale banking merger, and now AppsForBharat, to figure out what actually makes OKRs meaningful for a People Ops team, especially one where things move fast and break often. So here’s my honest take on it.
Stop measuring what you shipped. Start measuring what changed.
In a previous role, we rolled out a new HRMS across an organization of 2700+ employees. That sounds impressive in theory, but the real question was never “did we launch it.” It was whether it was valuable to people, did it free up our HRBPs to focus on more strategic work, and did the manual effort actually went down.
The launch is always the easy part. Adoption is where the real work begins, and that’s where your key result should live, not at the finish line of implementation but at the point where the change is actually making someone’s day convenient.
Your OKRs need to survive the chaos.
Startups almost never follow neat quarterly plans. Headcount doubles overnight, org structures get redrawn on a whiteboard, and I’ve been right in the middle of a merger between two organizations with two very different cultures and two very different ways of working. Rigid People Ops OKRs would have been irrelevant within weeks.
What worked instead was anchoring objectives to outcomes that mattered regardless of what changed around us, things like employee trust, cultural cohesion, and grievance resolution quality. The tactics shifted constantly. The direction never did.
Numbers matter, but feelings matter more.
At one point we had a solid operational metric: close employee grievances within 24-48 hours. It was great for discipline, but the key result I actually cared about was whether people felt heard after the process, whether they walked away trusting that HR had their back. Pulse surveys, 1-on-1 conversations, and retention patterns told us the real story here. Ticket closure time is a hygiene metric, and trust is the actual outcome.
People Ops is not a support function.
That belief is really an extension of something I hold more broadly, which is that People Ops is not a support function, and that’s the hill I’ll always stand on. In a high-growth startup, People Ops is a growth function, and it builds the infrastructure that lets every other team do their best work, whether that’s hiring, culture, systems, benefits, or engagement. Your OKRs should reflect that weight. Instead of writing “process X appraisals,” you write “enable managers to have better performance conversations.” Instead of writing “launch a benefits program,” you write “improve how employees perceive their total rewards.”
Why this matters even more at AppsForBharat.
This shows up nowhere more clearly than at AppsForBharat, where we’re building something deeply personal. Sri Mandir connects over 30 million devotees to temples, pujas, and spiritual practices through technology, in service of a mission to help a billion Indians on their spiritual and devotional journeys, and that has to be reflected internally too. You can’t build a platform centered on peace and contentment for users while running a chaotic, disconnected employee experience behind the scenes. The culture has to mirror the mission. That’s what makes People Ops here uniquely challenging and rewarding, because we’re not just scaling a team, we’re building an environment where people feel genuinely connected to what we’re creating.
When someone joins AppsForBharat, they’re not just joining a tech company, they’re joining a mission that touches the faith and trust of millions of people, and onboarding, engagement, and growth frameworks all need to carry that same sense of purpose. My OKRs here aren’t just about efficiency or compliance. They’re about building a people experience that’s worthy of the product we put out into the world.
This is really the whole advice I’d give any People Ops leader at a startup: don’t borrow OKR frameworks from product or engineering and paste them onto your function. Build OKRs that reflect what People Ops uniquely drives, the trust, the culture, and the infrastructure that lets everyone else do their best work. And if you’re lucky enough to work at a mission-driven company, make sure your people strategy honors that mission from day one
