OKRs (Objective and Key Results) help employees align with the company’s long-term visions and goals.
Setting measurable goals helps teams and individuals focus on priority tasks.
The beauty of well-defined OKR templates is that it empowers meaningful progress for employees and keeps them motivated.
In this article, we’ll see some of the popular software platforms that provide OKR templates to kick start goal tracking
What are OKRs?
OKR stands for objectives and key results. They provide a visual and collaborative environment where teams can brainstorm, prioritize, and track the progress of their OkRs in a collaborative and visual manner
In other words, it is a framework that motivates an organization to achieve its goals. The process increases productivity by keeping people focused on essential goals without ignoring low-priority tasks.
OKRs play a vital role in business growth, improving a company’s focus and driving continuous improvement in the right direction. Before we move ahead and understand why OKRs are essential for businesses.
Why are OKRs Important for Business?
Setting and achieving OKRs can benefit individuals, teams, and organizations. Here are a few benefits to consider:
Setting Goals: OKRs are a great way to standardize the goal-setting process for your whole team or company.
Boosting Engagement: You can measure your team members’ performance with features like tracking progress, weekly check-ins, and performance reviews. The system allows you to reward performers and train underperformers at the same time.
Tracking Performance: It helps to outline key information that every team member should include, like the timeline and status of the project. Get a real-time view of how your team is progressing toward completing important initiatives.
Adaptability: OKRs support agile methodology. They train team members to adapt to the agile workflow and respond to quickly changing circumstances while allowing teams to be collaborative.
Growth: By clearly setting and reviewing OKRs, an organization can learn from mistakes and improve goal-setting abilities.
Besides, having OKRs in place brings more clarity and focus and motivates employees to achieve goals faster. It fosters a culture of accountability that helps to align people’s goals and objectives with the company.
How to Create an OKR Template?
Creating OKRs from scratch involves following a sequence of steps in a structured format. You can create a spreadsheet, Word document, or a visual graphic design as your OKR template format.
Start by writing priority goals that align with the company’s vision in your template. Next, define the key results that indicate you’re moving towards your goals. Set goals that are measurable and quantifiable for better tracking.
Now it’s time to share the OKR sheet/doc with your team leads and members. Consult with them to refine and improve the OKRs based on their insights, suggestions, and feedback.
Review the objectives periodically and track managers’ and team members’ progress. Keep updating the OKRs to meet changing requirements and stay aligned with higher-level objectives.
What are OKR Templates?
OKR templates are pre-built templates used by organizations that are just getting started with OKRs. It’s a reusable guide that makes deciding what your team’s objectives should be and what key results you want to achieve easier.
By creating a simple OKR template, you can easily plan, track, and display your OKRs. It helps you standardize the goal-setting process and serves as a reference point to your teammates. OKR templates also simplify the process of tracking your progress toward your company goals in a single place.
Having a template in place saves a lot of time and clerical work. Rather than starting from scratch every quarter, just copy the template and fill in predefined fields. Once you fill in all the details, you can share goals with company stakeholders and show them your execution in real-time.
Not only OKR templates are easily editable, but they can be modified in case of a change in priorities. You can attach documents like sheets, graphs, presentations, images, and videos to your OKRs.
Let’s look at some of the best OKR template tools we can use to strategize your business quarters toward a more agile methodology.
Atlassian
Atlassian is a software company that creates a software development process management platform. It’s used by companies to manage projects and collaborate with their teams.
Atlassian is also known for its tools for software development, such as Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Trello.
You can start by creating a Confluence page for every objective. Here you can include the objective, key results, and other details about your goals. Next, embed Jira or Trello boards within the Confluence page to track progress.
Communicate OKRs to your teams by assigning them tasks and sub-tasks that align with the key results. Use your Confluence page to track progress and share the same with your teammates.
Smartsheet
Smartsheet is a cloud-based project management platform that enables organizations and teams to collaborate on project activities. Among its features are dashboard views, workflows, reports, and planning tools.
Being a project planning and scheduling platform, it offers a range of OKR templates for clearly defining goals and tracking progress. The templates are available in Excel, Word, PDF, and Google Sheets formats, making it easy to customize and share with your teams.
Smartsheet categorizes templates based on different stages of the project. For instance, it starts with the document template, wherein you can add the time frame, objectives, and related key results. Then, it’s the OKR tracking template for monitoring progress and defining roles for team members.
After defining the objectives, you’ll need to use the reporting and review templates to analyze the target outcomes, ongoing progress, and the score achieved. These Smartsheet templates are an excellent jumping-off point if you’re just learning OKRs.
Miro
Miro is a visual collaboration tool for remote teams, and they work collectively towards solving everyday tasks. It’s a free, easy-to-use virtual whiteboard that comes with plenty of features, including sticky notes, emojis, shapes, and an anonymous voting feature that captures everyone’s reaction.
Apart from the whiteboard templates, Miro also provides free OKR templates for setting up your business goals. Using these templates will streamline your goal-setting process, enhance visibility, and promote alignment across your team and organization. These templates are customizable and are used to define objectives, key results, and action plans.
To access Miro templates, navigate to Miro Template Gallery and select an OKR template from the built-in template library. Once you finalize the template, you can start customizing the template by adding your objectives, key results, and other fields.
Using Miro’s visual formatting features, you can color code different portions of the OKR template to see which team is responsible for the key result at a glance. On the whole, it is perfect for remote team collaboration.
HubSpot
HubSpot is one of the most popular platforms for marketing activities for effective communication. It’s more like a CRM platform that connects your email activities and customer responses. Hubspot is known for its easy-to-use content management system, sales hub, service hub, landing pages, templates, and lead generation opt-ins.
Like other marketing templates, Hubspot offers free OKR templates that are downloadable as PDFs, Excel sheets, or Google Sheets. Using Hubspot’s ready-made OKR template, you can add objectives tied to their key results in minutes.
Asana
Asana is a project management software used by enterprises to track their tasks and projects over time. It’s a great way to manage your OKRs and keep track of your progress toward the organization’s goals.
Creating an OKR template in Asana refers to creating goals. Using Asana Goals, you can build projects, set milestones, and connect them to your organization’s priorities. You can start by creating company goals and then move on to creating team goals.
Once you have goals set, you can share them with your stakeholders and managers. Team leaders can further customize the priorities using filters, assigning periods, and tracking status. Individual team members can check their goals by navigating to the “My Goals” tab in the Asana tool.
Mooncamp
Mooncamp is an OKR platform built for agile and purpose-driven teams. You can automate workflows in a single workspace operating system by introducing agile goals, weekly check-ins, and more.
If you’ve not used any OKR system before, you can start using Mooncamp’s free OKR Excel Template. It’s intuitive, easy to fill out, and can be customized to meet your needs. Regardless of size or industry, it is used by any company or team.
Start by downloading their OKR Excel Template and open it in Microsoft Excel or use the Google Sheets version. Share the sheet access with your teammates and click the “Getting Started” tab that will guide you through Mooncamp’s OKR tracking template.
From the second tab, you’ll see the OKR dashboard that pulls information from different team sheets. You can also track the weekly check-ins from the “check-in” tab. Lastly, you can arrange objectives and key results into respective tabs for your teams.
Mural
Mural is a visual collaboration platform for product and strategy planning. You can use it to put methodologies like design thinking and agile in place in a visually engaging format.
With Mural’s OKR template, you can define your objectives and Key results for two planning sessions. To access Mural’s OKR template, you need to create an account and login into the Mural app. Next, look for “Template Library” to access the templates.
Once you’ve selected an OKR template, customize it to meet your specific goals and objectives. You can add text boxes, sticky notes, and other elements. Collaborate with teammates by inviting them to edit the template and contribute to OKR discussion.
As your team progresses toward achieving goals, you can use Mural’s visual elements like labels to indicate the completion of tasks. Keep reviewing your team’s results, make necessary adjustments, and iterate Key results.
Figma
Figma is a popularly growing all-in-one platform for designing, prototyping, developing, and creating flowcharts for strategic planning. It has an intuitive and easy-to-use interface that helps you create prototypes for any project and share them with your team without any code.
With Figma’s FigJam platform, teams build better products by aligning on decisions, defining ideas, and advancing work. Right from adding your brainstorming ideas to creating agile workflows, the platform offers features for better strategic planning.
You get plenty of readymade templates to create workflows without starting from scratch. FigJam’s OKR template helps you list objectives and key results for your product team.
To get started, browse through the available Figma’s OKR templates and select the one that matches your needs. Duplicate the template and customize it by adding your objectives and key results. Invite team members to provide inputs on OKR discussion and track their progress using checkmarks and progress bars.
Better Strategizing at Your Fingertips
OKRs are used by all industries and departments like IT, product development, marketing, finance, and HR to collaborate on projects effectively and achieve goals. However, it is important to note that OKRs are different from KPIs.
Readymade OKR templates enable you to set your company goals faster without any fancy software requirements. The OKR system promotes a shared understanding of goals and encourages open conversation, which leads to improved teamwork.
