Health Metrics, BAU, and OKRs

Using OKRs for BAU activity can be boring at best but sometimes defining health metrics as you write OKRs, or even introducing “health metric OKRs” can be a useful way to transition from project based work towards a focus on outcomes. They enable you to use the OKR framework to articulate the things that must be maintained even in the face of great change.

Shooting for the Stars

Traditional OKR advice suggests keeping “business as usual” (BAU) work out of your OKRs. The thinking goes that OKRs are for our big, audacious, transformative goals, not the routine stuff that just has to get done or happens naturally.

Chris McChesney, the godfather of 4DX®, talks about Wildly Important Goals® that are “really important” but won’t happen unless you change things up significantly (video clip).

In Measure What Matters, Astro Teller, who leads Google X, says, “If you want your car to get fifty miles per gallon, fine. But if I tell you it has to run on a gallon of gas for five hundred miles, you have to start over.”

In my early days of using OKRs, I fully agreed with this line of thinking. Focusing on game-changing outcomes forces you out of the daily grind and pushes you to set goals that feel almost impossible.

Keeping the Lights On

But here’s the thing: when you’re trying to use OKRs to drive broader organisational change, you often start with a mix of projects and BAU work. Projects usually drive innovation, while BAU is the stable engine that keeps everything running.

For years, I worked with a cool design and UX company in London that made award-winning games. But behind the scenes, they also did a lot of work for large corporate clients — less exciting but steady and profitable. The games got all the attention, but the corporate work “kept the lights on.”

Telling a company like this to ignore BAU when setting OKRs is like telling a restaurant to ignore sourcing ingredients or washing dishes. No matter how creative you are in the kitchen, if you don’t have quality ingredients or basic hygiene, your business will fail fast.

I often suggest that organisations avoid adopting OKRs until they have a solid system for handling BAU work—one that’s almost “boring”—so they can focus their energy on innovation. But the truth is, BAU work doesn’t just happen on its own; it takes real effort and attention on its own.

If you completely leave BAU work out of OKRs, the people responsible for that work might feel like their contributions don’t matter. And while not everyone needs OKRs, having a way to include BAU in OKRs can make the transition smoother.

That’s where “health metric” OKRs come in.

What Are Health Metric OKRs?

Health metrics keep you grounded even while you aim for the stars.

Revenue, retention, customer returns, app error rates, feedback: you may not want to dramatically change any of these just now but they still matter – a lot.

For example, you might want to create products that people love, measured by metrics like weekly active users or monthly recurring revenue. But, at the same time, you’ll want to keep team morale high and retain existing customers.

While OKRs focus on the changes you want to see, health metrics focus on the numbers you want to keep steady: build times, customer satisfaction, repeat customer rates, team happiness, etc.

For example, a health metric OKR might be:

“Our team and customers stay happy”

Measured by:

• 5 out of 5 weekly team happiness score
• 0% drop in monthly customer retention

This isn’t a traditional OKR. It doesn’t aim for a big change but it uses the OKR format to express a condition you want to maintain.

You could pair this with an ambitious OKR like:

“Our new service delights the market”

Measured by:

• 10k new customers
• Top spot in a market survey

This combination of an ambitious OKR and a course steadying health metric OKR gives you an inspiring goal and clear guardrails to keep things on track as you stretch your ambition. It helps everyone see how their work fits into the bigger picture and lets you use OKRs or at least OKR-like language to describe your portfolio more completely.

But this shouldn’t be a long term habit. Over time, you’ll want to fix the BAU so it “just works” and use OKRs to describe the really inspiring, game-changing transformation. But during the OKR adoption process, this approach can help ease the transition away from projects work towards outcome based planning and aspiration.