Often when I help a company roll out OKRs, the same thing happens. We set the company objective, we craft key results, everyone’s excited. And then someone raises their hand.
“What about customer support? Don’t they get OKRs too?”
It’s not customer support asking this. It’s the leaders. They’re worried that leaving a team out of the OKR process means telling them they don’t matter. “Won’t people feel left out?” “Shouldn’t everyone have objectives so they feel included?”
I get it. But think about what they’re really saying: the only tool they have for showing a team they’re valued is the goal-setting framework. If you can only make people feel important by giving them OKRs, you’ve got a leadership problem, not an OKR problem.
The Name Is the First Insult
In OKR land, work that isn’t attached to an objective gets called “BAU” — business as usual. Say it out loud. Business as usual. It sounds like elevator music.
Now look at what BAU actually covers. Customer service making sure the people who pay you money don’t leave. IT keeping your infrastructure from catching fire at 2 a.m. Finance making sure everyone gets paid. Legal keeping you out of court.
You know what’s a good analogy for this? Your cardiovascular system. Not as thrilling as shiny new projects. But stop it for five minutes and nothing else matters.
I call this Heartbeat Work now. Because that’s the job — keep the rhythm going so everything else can function. The most ambitious OKRs in the world won’t save you if your servers are down and your customers are furious.
OKRs Are the Wrong Tool Here
OKRs are for pushing. You take something strategically important and you make it urgent. Stretch goals. They work when a team owns its time and can throw real energy at making something dramatically better.
Customer support doesn’t get to decide that this quarter they’ll reinvent the ticketing system. They’re answering tickets. HR can’t pause recruiting to experiment with a new benefits structure. These teams are at capacity doing work the company literally cannot survive without.
So when you hand them OKRs on top of that, you’re not motivating them. You’re telling them to do more with nothing more. Toward goals they already know they can’t hit. I once told an HR manager her team didn’t need to do OKRs and she physically sagged with relief. She’d been dreading another quarter of pretending.
So What Do You Do Instead?
Give them Health Metrics — a small set of numbers that tell you whether the heartbeat is strong. Customer satisfaction. Response time. System uptime. Retention. Track them green/yellow/red. Green is fine. Yellow, keep an eye on it. Red means you drop your OKR work and fix this first, because something critical is failing.
These aren’t lesser metrics. They protect what you’ve already built while the OKR teams push into new territory. Without them, you get the classic failure: company chases a shiny new objective while the foundation rots.
Then fix your rituals. Most companies celebrate OKR progress — Monday commitments, Friday wins, quarterly reviews. If heartbeat teams aren’t part of any of that, they’re invisible. Not because they’re slacking, but because the system literally cannot see them.
So put them in Friday wins. Customer support shares the customer they saved this week. IT talks about the outage nobody noticed because they caught it at 4 a.m. These are company wins. Treat them like it.
And — this is the one leaders consistently skip — just tell people their work matters. Out loud. Specifically. Could you function without customer support? Without HR? Without the ops team? You could not. When was the last time you walked over and said so?
Sometimes Heartbeat Work Earns a Promotion
Every so often a health metric goes red and stays there. Customer satisfaction has been sliding for three quarters. Reliability keeps getting worse.
That’s when heartbeat work becomes an OKR. The CEO says we need to turn this around, resources shift, and the team that’s been quietly holding things together finally gets real investment.
When the number gets healthy, it goes back to being a health metric. The work didn’t get less important. It just stopped being an emergency. That’s a good thing.
This Isn’t a Framework Problem
No framework will make your teams feel valued. Not OKRs, not KPIs, not any acronym you can throw at it. You make people feel valued by seeing their work, naming it accurately, and building systems that don’t render them invisible the moment you start chasing something new.
Stop calling it business as usual. Start calling it what it is: the work that keeps everything else alive.