I'm genuinely struggling to understand the place of a construct like OKR in a world where Slack like tools exist.
Ones a chat app the other is a system of setting objectives and measuring against those objectives.
Does it still make sense when the org is closer together due to slack
Your OKRs put that sort of thing in one place. The process to determine what the OKRs are ensure that everyone's on the same page about the objectives. People in an organization want to feel like they know what they're working towards. When they don't they get stressed out and unproductive.
Most okr are dependent on someone else - the Android app guy will not achieve their okr if the API guy is off doing something else. In that way, the whole aspect of goal setting and achieving that is probably more inefficient using an okr structure than thrashing it out on slack (and most likely in a dedicated channel called "planning")
You need to try and think about what things look like when the company is much, much larger.
If you’re setting them and always missing them because of entities with other objectives, then your organization is obviously misaligned and needs to evaluate its goals.
Slack is a chat app.
You can chat over slack about goals, but slack isn’t goals and goals aren’t a chat app.
You can be on slack or email or around the water-cooler all day long. I don't think that makes that much difference. It's not like as soon as you bring Slack into an organization all this structure emerges that helps you focus your efforts on what to do. Chat app or no chat app, people are always coordinating with each other to complete task-level work.
OKRs help you think first strategically (longer than 1 year) then tactically (between 1 month to 1 year) and then operationally (day to day, week to week). Chat apps don't do that for you.
They just aren't related.
One thing I did, I don't know if this is part of OKRs anywhere else, is I really wanted numbers on all the KRs. So I added columns for the success value and data type: binary, ordinal, normalized, continuous, whatever it is. So at least I know what kind of math to apply. And it's a nice checksum that you know you've discussed that KR enough that you understand it enough to compute on: (binary, success=1, 0) or (ordinal, 37, 12) is super useful.
I let the 1:1s slide to every 2 weeks once we had a visual. Some prefer keeping the weekly. Some just stopped showing up. Hint: I've learned the 1:1 no-shows are also the ones who mail it in generally.
We have some federally mandated inspections coming so I dropped a big red line on that quarter. That's a nice visual to help say "it's gotta happen by then, or we're not doing it until after".
Laid out in front of me, some of these arrows clearly needed more wood. Some needed to be discarded. Some personnel changes were needed. Personnel changes are in progress.
Let me be very clear, my direct reports absolutely manipulate my behavior. That's their job. I've got plenty of clinical and research work. My role as the lab director is to synthesize what they're telling me and recruit resources for them, cut deals with other departments, go to my boss, whatever it takes.
And, when my boss's boss's boss put out word that my boss was getting promoted and they were looking for my new boss, I could have stepped into that breach, gunning for a promotion. But it's frankly a lot early for me to be looking for another promotion and I knew I had lots of work to deal with locally. So instead, I wrote a recommendation for a colleague and encouraged her to apply. And guess who my new boss is?
The upshot is my former colleague, now boss, is totally on my side. For her, this was a pheonix-rising sort of opportunity. She's on a mission from God to be the best boss ever. In our first meeting (remember, first impressions) I showed her our OKRs. She had never heard of OKRs, probably still doesn't know what that stands for, but she knew, instantly, that I'm tracking "all the stuff" like white on rice. You know you did it right when the boss sees your OKRs and completely changes the subject to start talking about problems in other areas. She's not worried about the lab's direction. She was, and is, plenty stressed with other departments she owns. But if I tell her we need help, she's very clear we need that help.
And we've got some of the things done. Which is nice. It's a little early to start computing annual success rate, but it won't be 0. I think most people hear about OKRs and setting the bar so high it makes you nervous, 60-70% success rates, etc and get worried. I think without OKRs,or something like that, a lot of people don't realize how many high bars they've set for themselves. 70 projects for 40 people is a little concerning. And I won't even tell you how many times I said "Hey, it's okay, let's dial this back a little" or "Can we buy more time on this? Who do I need to talk to?"
Also, we do use numbers on OKRs (at well-known modern tech giant). We do try to normalize to a real number [0,1] indicating roughly the probability of successfully meeting the goal by the end of quarter.
EDIT: to clarify, we do track something quantitative for each KR: error rate, response time, customer satisfaction score, whatever. Then we normalize to a probability so that we can scan the columns quickly and compare like with like.