ByteDance, the TikTok owner, is working to make its workplace culture less scrappy, pushy, and fast-paced as the company's growth slows, or in other words, enters into a period of stability.

On February 17, Liang Rubo, CEO of the high-profile company, sent out an internal letter saying that ByteDance’s OKRs cycle has changed from bimonthly to quarterly, and the review meeting has also changed from bimonthly to quarterly.

“With this new approach, we are hoping to leave more time for impact before reflection, and be more flexible," the CEO said in the internal letter.

OKRs stands for Objectives and Key Results, which is a goal-setting framework that typically involves setting monthly, quarterly, or annual goals and key results, and checking in regularly to monitor progress toward those goals. Over the past few decades, it has been widely adopted by startups and has driven the success of numerous companies including Intel, Google, Uber, Amazon, and LinkedIn. 

Such a framework is popular in the startup world because it works extremely well for fast-changing companies, and making short-term OKRs allows startups to rapidly adjust their focus to better identify opportunities and expand their business.

Bimonthly OKRs were once effective, but as ByteDance expanded from a startup to a multinational conglomerate with more than 100,000 staffers worldwide, this short-term goal-setting and results-review approach has sparked resentment among employees.

A claimed-to-be current employee criticized the practice on Blind, an anonymous workplace social network: "Bi-monthly OKRs and twice-a-year perf result in short-term performative culture, lots of duplicate teams working on identical projects, endless dead marches due to lack of long-term planning." 

Ideally, OKRs should work bottom-up, but at ByteDance, it’s more like top-down, another ByteDance employee who declined to be named told PingWest. Some team leaders, in order to please their superiors, even set overly ambitious or unrealistic goals, which can be stressful and demoralizing for teams and individuals alike, as they are nearly impossible to achieve in two months. 

“This is part of the company's performative culture, in which those team leaders don't really give a hoot about whether or not their goal-setting is reasonable for their subordinates, as long as the upper management is impressed,” the employee said.

While not convinced that tweaking OKRs and meeting frequencies will immediately transform the dislikable culture, he thinks it may be a good start. “At least we have more time to plan, to get things done, and less time spent on meetings, which is a relief,” he said.

Even Liang himself was aware of some of the company's "performative culture", such as the workload and preparation that comes with bi-monthly meetings." In the letter to all employees, he wrote, "I have heard that some teams even have rehearsal sessions (for bimonthly meetings)."

While the CEO didn't acknowledge that the “performative” issues were driving the shift, he stressed the need for employees to be pragmatic in their day-to-day work, keeping meetings short and precise, and making documents clear and easy to read.

As the company moved out of its start-up phase and gradually exited its rapid expansion mode, its management approach had to shift gears, and the first step may be to extend the OKRs cycle.

There is a case for reference. OKRs were introduced to Google in 1999 and were quickly adopted throughout the company, which had approximately 30 employees at the time. Since then, OKRs have become an integral part of the tech giant’s culture and DNA. 

Under Larry Page, Google conducted quarterly OKRs. In 2019, however, Sundar Pichai, who succeeded Page as CEO in 2015, cut quarterly OKRs, opting to focus only on annual OKRs and quarterly progress reports.

Pichai's move may have gone against conventional OKR wisdom, but it made sense because Google was no longer a startup, according to operational efficiency expert Nick Sonnenberg, since stability has allowed Google to shift its focus to long-term initiatives that will create greater impact.

Now, with its main business stabilizing, it's time for ByteDance to look at longer-term plans. “For many of our mature and complex businesses, we believe a quarterly rhythm (OKRs) might be more appropriate…By reducing the meeting frequency, we can facilitate more structured and in-depth theme discussions to cover more aspects of our business and management,” Liang said in the letter to employees.

At a town hall meeting in December, the CEO told that despite an increase in total daily active users over the past year, the company has still missed the target it set for itself in early 2022, and revenue growth has slowed. 

Over the past year, the social upstart has undertaken a series of cost-cutting efforts, including downsizing across business lines to focus on what matters within the company and significantly scaling back its hiring plan.

Cover image by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash