OKRs Explained: What They Are + Examples & How to Write Them

OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results—a goal-setting framework that helps companies define priorities, align teams, and track measurable outcomes.

The introduction of OKRs is generally attributed to Andy Grove, who pioneered the concept during his tenure at Intel. John Doerr who attended a course within Intel taught by Andy Grove was an ardent supporter of the OKR concept. John then introduced the concept at a start-up he had invested in called Google. OKRs became central to Google’s management methodology and is credited to have greatly contributed to Google’s growth.

OKRs were successfully implemented at LinkedIn, Twitter, Uber, as more companies recognized and started to take advantage of the OKRs framework. Research shows that specific goals can lead to better performance and goal attainment.

OKRs aim to achieve business goals and superior organizational performance through alignment of employee performance and team results. It is seen as a way to focus on value creation, boost self-management, and create high-performance-oriented teams.

Many companies across the US and globally use OKRs to align team goals, track performance, and drive business growth.

Let’s delve further into the OKR concept, benefits of OKRs, and how to write them.

What are Objectives and Key Results (OKR)? (Definition)

Objectives and Key Results help set a specific strategy and goals for a team or organization over a specified duration. At the end of the time period, you evaluate how well you succeeded in meeting those goals. Spending time in defining team goals and organizational strategy in a specific measurable manner can help align everyone’s efforts.

OKRs are typically set quarterly and consist of clear objectives paired with measurable key results.

Let’s break up the words:

• Objective – What you want to accomplish
• Key Result – Quantitative data to know if you are there.

The key part is setting a clear vision and measuring progress toward it. For example, a business objective could be “Increase website traffic,” with key results like “Achieve 50,000 monthly visitors” and “Improve conversion rate by 20%.”

Let’s go deeper into OKRs meaning:

An Objective is setting a goal to be achieved in the future. It provides a clear direction of where you want to go. It could be referred to as an inspirational vision that is time-bound and specific.

An Objective refers to the ‘What’ and they should:

• express goals and visions,
• be aggressive, aspirational yet realistic,
• be time-bound,
• convey endpoints or end states, and
• be objective, tangible, and clear.

A Key Result is a quantifiable target value that measures the progress towards an objective. It expresses measurable milestones that describe the progress towards an objective.

A Result refers to the “How” or “How do I know I’m there?”, and they should:

• be measurable milestones,
• be easily quantifiable (Score of 0-100% or 0 to 1.0),
• include evidence of completion,
• achievable yet difficult, and
• measure business results and not output or tasks.

How to Start Objectives and Key Results (OKR)?

An OKR starts in a cycle so that teams and management can set goals, view results, discuss learnings, and account for environmental changes. A strong feedback mechanism will help set the right goals for the following cycles.

When setting project objectives, start with organizational OKRs and then break them down to team OKRs. Organizational OKRs should be aspirational and should have all stakeholders’ buy-in.

Team OKRs can be product-wise or departmental, but they must roll into the organization’s objectives. They could be a mix of top-down and bottom-up suggestions, this enables teams across the organization to contribute and strive with earnest towards the shared goals.

Each team could have three to five objectives with at least three key results for each objective. It’s critical that every team tracks their active progress towards their objectives.

Set specific review meetings to enable everyone to be aware of the progress and discuss the challenges they might face. OKRs are typically part of quarterly planning but they can be monthly or annual too.

It’s important to be transparent on what objectives different teams are working on and their current progress. Establish clear and consistent communication to discuss progress and set accountability amongst teams and members.

Review OKRs as needed or as per environmental circumstances. Be flexible to update the company, team, or personal OKRs as necessary.

Importance of Objectives and Key Results (OKR)

Without clear goals, teams often struggle with alignment, focus, and measurable outcomes. OKRs enable organizations to define a specific purpose and get everyone to contribute and focus on realizing the purpose while adding value. If OKRs are implemented correctly they have multiple benefits for the organization:

1. Improves organizational goal alignment

OKRs help managers and employees align the work they do to specific organizational outcomes, this sets everyone to move in the same direction.

This is the key benefit of OKRs. Top management sets the company-wide OKRs (preferably in consultation with teams) and each team sets their OKRs in line with the same OKRs. Each individual would also set their own OKRs that roll into the team and company OKRs.

2. Increases focus

OKRs help to prioritize team outcomes in relation to their impact in achieving organizational goals. The simple and reduced number of objectives allows employees to focus on their daily work. It helps reduce time spent on urgent but unimportant tasks. It’s recommended to have a few objectives per team so that their efforts are focused in one direction.

3. Increases employee motivation and commitment

As OKRs are transparent, aligned, and created in agreement it gives a sense of higher purpose to employees and management.

This in turn increases their engagement, motivation, and commitment.   This is an important factor as according to Gallup only a third of employees are engaged worldwide. Higher engagement in turn leads to higher job satisfaction and improved productivity.

4. Enables self-management

When team members are involved in goal setting through a bottom-up approach of OKR definition, it results in greater involvement and commitment from them. With this approach, team members hold themselves accountable and are self-motivated to achieve their goals.

5. Fosters a spirit of innovation

OKRs that are aspirational, set employees to think of creative and innovative ways to reach their goals. OKRs can be specifically structured to encourage employees to think creatively. It’s important to not get discouraged when 100% achievement scores are not met, 70-80% scores are great. If new innovative practices arise from the OKR practice then the organization either way benefits.

Examples of Objectives and Key Results (OKR)

Let’s take a quick look at how to write OKRs. As mentioned earlier, think of realistic yet aspirational objectives and keep quantifiable data for the results.

OKR Example 1:

Business Objective: Launch a financial consulting website

Key Result 1: Research and purchase the best available domain name by September 1

Key Result 2: Create a website framework, content strategy, and blog post guidelines by December 1

Key Result 3: Publish your first blog post by March 1

OKR Example 2:

Customer Objective: Improve customer experience through self-service within the year

Key Result 1: 20% Increase in the self-service method of ticket resolution

Key Result 2: Reduce cost of ticket resolution by 25%

Key Result 3: Reduce ticket closure time to 36 hours

List of OKR Software You Must Explore!

1. Profit.co

Let’s kickstart this list with Profit.co, an OKR software that allows you to focus and track team and individual OKRs and team engagement on goals. It lets you focus, measure, and achieve your strategy.

With Profit.co, you can plan your OKRs at the beginning of the quarter, promote employee engagement using collaborative features, and use a highly structured reflect and reset process. It also has other features, such as task management, strategy tracking, employee development, templates, OKR coaching and certification, and more.

Furthermore, Profit.co integrates with Microsoft Teams, Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot, and several other popular business applications. It also allows you to use its Profit Integration Engine to develop your custom integrations.

Pricing:

• The startup plan is free of cost
• The Growth plan costs $7/month/user

2. Simple OKR

If you’re someone who is just starting out or just looking for simplicity, then Simple OKR is a great OKR software for you. It offers solutions for the company, team, and individual use.

Simple OKR is very intuitive and helps you visualize objectives and progress. It shows data on a single, simple dashboard where each objective is bundled with associated key results, and the current year, quarter, and progress are presented as percentage and bar graphs.

In addition to that, Simple OKR provides solutions for OKR alignment for all team members, progress tracking with OKR targets, 360 performance reviews, unlimited users, and lots more.

Pricing:

• Simple OKR is available for $49.99/month

3. Betterworks

Here we have Betterworks, an OKR software that handles transparency and alignment to unify your organization and empower employees. It is suitable for midsize and enterprise organizations.

Betteworks combines OKRs, coaching conversations, and real-time feedback, and helps your members to track cross-functional objectives. It also allows you to praise progress and get updates as well.

Some other features of Betterworks include a comprehensive company organization chart, gamification and social tools for engagement, insights and analytics, easy milestone setting for each goal, and best practices for program design, change management, and adoption.

Furthermore, it also supports various integrations with multiple popular business applications.

Pricing

• Betterworks costs $8/user/month.

Read more: 11 Kanban Tools and Software to Explore!

4. Engagedly

Engagedly is an OKR tool that offers performance review software with elements of employee engagement to provide automated and regular reviews, and actionable feedback to help motivate and improve your employees.

With Engagedly’s advanced analytics and reporting, it uses OKRs to create intuitive graphs to understand your company’s progress. It shows OKRs on a company level and breaks them down to an individual level to present how employees are doing their tasks.

What makes Engagedly stand out is its user interface because it is modern, colorful, organized, compartmentalized, and eye-catching.

Moreover, Engagedly offers other features, such as goal setting, peer praise, objectives alignment, idea generation, and more. It also includes multiple integrations as well.

Pricing

• Engagedly starts at $6/user/month

5. Lattice

Up next we have Lattice, a performance management software that includes OKRs and employee engagement features. It helps create both individual and company goals.

With Lattice, you can set measurable objectives using a range of goal-setting methods, and track your goals to monitor both personal and overall company performance and progress.

Lattice allows you to save past performance reviews within its system. You can use its ‘People’ tab to view individual people, teams, milestones, OKRs, company updates, and more.

Furthermore, Lattice offers features such as 360 feedback, engagement surveys, employee recognition, one-on-ones, employee growth plans, and lots more.

Pricing

• Performance plan costs $9/user/month when billed annually
• Performance & Engagement plan costs $12/user/month when billed annually
• Enterprise plan pricing depends on your company’s size and needs

Read more: 10 OKR Examples You Must Not Miss Out!

6. Weekdone

Weekdone is another premium OKR software and it combines professional OKR coaching services with weekly check-in functionality. It facilitates conversation, feedback, and recognition. It is a great choice for small to medium-sized teams or companies.

With Weekdone, you can easily educate and seamlessly onboard your team with OKRs and also engage in conversation using its weekly check-ins, comments, likes, and reactions.

Weekdone allows OKRs to be set as personal, team, or company objectives. It also lets you define and track your objectives and OKR progress in addition to showing how your employees are performing.

Pricing

• Weekdone is free for up to 3 users
• $108/ten users/month

7. Perdoo

Finally, we have Perdoo, a user-friendly OKR software that is also a great tool to evaluate KPIs and OKRs. It is suitable for teams and businesses of all sizes.

Perdoo has a centralized platform that allows your entire team to monitor their week’s work and achievements in a single view and helps them understand how their work and objectives contribute to the company’s goals.

With Perdoo, you can set goals, share real-time strategies, align resources, and evaluate progress with reports. Furthermore, their solution is available in multiple languages.

Pricing

• The Starter plan is free forever.
• Premium plan costs $7.60/user/month.

Set Your OKRs Strategy with Bit.ai

Many teams use modern collaboration tools to manage and track OKRs effectively.

Bit.ai is designed to run your entire company’s work, processes. and projects, so your employees can work more efficiently.

Bit’s workspaces are a great way to preserve your company’s OKRs and work in one space for your team to access. Create workspaces for personal use, teams, departments, clients, or the entire company.

Bit helps keep all of your OKRs in one central place so you can communicate around any of your goals, weekly projects, content, notes, meeting minutes, and more. Bit is where work happens.

Work with your team in real-time co-editing and using inline comments along with @mentions to bring your colleagues in the same place to discuss your OKRs and make smarter decisions. Use Bit’s chat feature so that conversations take place around work.

Bit’s smart search makes it fast and easy to find what you’re looking for. Search across workspaces, folders, documents, the text inside documents, and any type of digital content that has been added. Find anything you need in seconds.

Works with your team to weave content together to visually and contextually discuss work. Reduce the number of tabs that need to be opened and bouncing around applications. Do your work in one place while integrating your content across 100+ popular applications and any type of digital content into your living documents.

Share important Bit documents with a trackable link and measure when a document was accessed, how much time was spent, and how frequently it was accessed.  Enables you to monitor documents to create efficiencies in the work you do.

Start Using OKRs to Align Your Team and Achieve Better Results

Considering all the benefits of OKR, it seems that the OKR tool is easy to implement and is worth trying. It’s likely due to the simplicity and inclusiveness of the OKR framework, organizations would be willing to take the exercise rather quickly.

To really adopt them effectively though, a lot of effort is required from the team. It would be worthwhile to read more on the topic before you begin. Do let us know your thoughts on OKRs and your tips to get it done right.