Set Better Objectives and Key Results With Our OKR Template

Goals should be the cogs that drive the whole company forward. But many leaders and employees focus too heavily on their individual targets, losing sight of how they fit into the larger machine. 

Objectives and key results (OKRs) can strengthen the connection between individual, team, and company goals — but only if they’re well-written and thoroughly integrated into your company culture. 

It helps to have an easy, accessible system that’s standardized across the business. At Lattice, we’ve developed a quarterly OKRs template to help you incorporate OKRs easily into everyday processes, from one-on-one check-ins to team stand-ups. 

In this article, we’ve broken down the benefits of setting OKRs, with tips and examples to help you set better OKRs at the employee, team, and company levels so you can get the most out of our free downloadable template.

What are OKRs?

Objectives and key results (OKRs) are a goal-setting framework designed to align an organization’s efforts with its top priorities. More than just a performance tool, OKRs serve as a strategic approach to connecting goals across all levels of the business, while providing a clear methodology for tracking progress and driving measurable results. 

There are two parts to OKRs:

• The objective is a concise qualitative statement of your goal.
• The key results set out specific, measurable outcomes toward achieving that objective. 

In other words, OKRs identify where you want to go (your objectives) and how to get there (your key results). In this way, they provide a roadmap for more effective performance. 

OKRs are graded on a scale from 0.0 (no progress) to 1.0 (fully achieved). You should aim for a score of 0.6 or 0.7 for each OKR. Too low a score tells you your OKRs are likely overambitious. But a perfect score indicates you’re not being ambitious enough. OKRs contribute to growth and progress by challenging you to keep striving for greater success. 

Benefits of Setting and Tracking OKRs

Adopting a structured OKR strategy can have an outsized impact on both your productivity and workplace culture, making a real difference in how your business operates.

Here are 5 benefits that OKRs can bring to your business: 

1. OKRs give your objectives focus and clarity.

The OKR approach typically limits you to between 3 and 5 objectives at a time, each with between 2 and 4 key results. So, it pushes you to be specific about your goals and how to go about achieving them. 

Setting OKRs together and reviewing them often helps team members focus on what really matters and avoid getting caught up in tasks that don’t move the goal forward. This keeps scope creep in check, a common issue with projects that aren’t well-defined or managed.

2. OKRs help teams and organizations align their goals and actions.

Too often, goal-setting happens in silos, with little joined-up thinking as to how individual objectives can contribute to the team and the organization as a whole. 

By connecting the dots from the organizational mission to individual objectives, OKRs give all levels of your company a cohesive structure within which to collaborate. 

3. OKRs increase motivation, engagement, and continual improvement.

When employees are clear on what their goals are and how they contribute to the organizational mission, it can fuel a sense of purpose. And the more engaged employees are, the more productive they tend to be.

The OKR framework creates the solid structure and direction that are fundamental for innovative teamwork. As a result, OKRs can spark innovation and creativity. Ambitious goals require creative, team-driven solutions that can boost engagement and motivation for both individuals and the team as a whole. 

OKRs are set with input from employees, so they’re not top-down mandates. This sense of involvement gives employees ownership, which can make the goals feel more meaningful to them.

4. OKRs contribute to agility and adaptability.

If goals are only set and written down during performance reviews, without a clear process for achieving them, they can easily be forgotten or put on the back burner. They might also become irrelevant as priorities and conditions change.

OKRs, on the other hand, are more dynamic. With frequent review cycles — monthly, biweekly, or even weekly — they help teams stay on track, address roadblocks as they arise, and adapt as needed.

5. OKRs enable better decision-making.

OKRs provide a straightforward, quantifiable way to track progress and, ideally, success. By cutting through the ambiguity and setting clear benchmarks, OKRs give you valuable data that helps guide future strategic planning.

Regularly reviewing OKRs lets leaders be more strategic in how they allocate resources, supporting decisions with concrete evidence. Plus, because OKRs cascade down through the entire organization, data from top-level goals can help inform planning across different teams, improving collaboration and breaking down silos.

OKR Template

With a clear and easy-to-use OKR template, you can ensure you’re consistent and systematic about how you set OKRs across the organization. Our free OKR template should help you frame your OKRs, identify who’s responsible for what action, and understand when and how they should be put into practice. 

The quarterly OKRS template includes sections for you to add: 

Objectives

These are those high-level aspirations that your employees and teams are aiming for. Each level (company, team, and individual) should have 3 to 5 specific objectives to aim for. These are clear, ambitious, conversational, and qualitative — for example, “Improve customer satisfaction by making our user experience better.”

Key Results

These are the actionable steps that will contribute to completing those objectives. Key results are quantitative and measurable, allowing you to evaluate progress toward completing them, and by extension, achieving the related objective. For our objective above, an example key result might be: “Conduct user feedback surveys with 200 customers to identify pain points.” You should set about three key results for each of your objectives.

Owners

OKRs should clearly define who is responsible for each action and the overall objective, so nothing slips through the cracks. 

Deadlines and Review Cycles

OKRs also need to be clear about when the key results and the objectives need to be achieved. They should also include a schedule for regular reviews and updates to track progress.

How to Write OKRs

Now that you’ve got the framework, let’s look at how to write effective OKRs that can keep your business goals aligned at every level. 

Leadership involvement is your starting point here. Keep your business's mission, vision, values, and priorities at the forefront as you set and review your OKRs. Begin by identifying the key company goal that your departmental, team, and individual OKRs will support.

With that in mind, here’s how to set effective OKRs:

How to Write Objectives

An objective should be an ambitious and inspirational statement. It should be qualitative and forward-looking — but not open-ended. You must be able to know when you’ve definitively achieved your objective. 

Think about why you want to achieve that specific objective, and what it will mean for your team and company.

Ask yourself: “Where do we want to get to? What will success look like?”

How to Write Key Results

Key results should be specific actions that contribute to achieving the related objective. They should be quantitative, actionable, and metric-driven so that you can track progress and know when you have completed them. 

Stick to 2 to 4 key results for each objective and be clear about the timelines for completing them. When your completed key results are added up, they should produce a finished objective. 

Ask yourself: “What do we need to do to make that objective a reality? If we complete these key results, will we fully achieve the objective?”

Examples of OKRs

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Notice how the key results at higher levels cascade down to inform the objectives of the lower levels of the business. This is the beauty of OKRs for keeping everyone contributing to the business’s success. 

Using Tech to Operationalize OKRs

While we hope our template is a simple and effective tool for writing your OKRs, it’s still just a starting point. To really make OKRs part of your organizational DNA, you need a tool like Lattice OKRs & Goals to embed OKRs into the ongoing operations of your teams. 

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Rather than languishing on an isolated Excel spreadsheet, OKRs come to life in Lattice. 

• Lattice’s intuitive dashboards give managers, leaders, and teams the freedom to track progress toward their goals in real-time, spot obstacles and bottlenecks, and revise OKRs to keep progress on track.
• Lattice helps to make OKRs an accessible part of employees’ daily work, so they’re easy to incorporate into performance reviews, one-on-one meetings, and employee development discussions. 
• Integrations with tools like Salesforce, Slack, and Jira allow you to integrate goal-setting into daily workflows at every level of your business. 

Adding your OKRs to your team’s tools means they’re on hand and trackable, so individuals, teams, and leaders can always be clear on how daily work contributes to OKRs at every level. 

To set and track OKRs that will contribute to business success at every level, download Lattice’s quarterly OKRs template.

OKR FAQs

How often should we review and update our OKRs?

Ideally, you should aim to conduct your OKR planning and update your OKRs at the end of each quarter, to take account of progress and shifting priorities. However, with a tool like Lattice OKRs & Goals, you can review your progress more regularly — monthly, biweekly, or weekly — to keep your OKRs on track. 

Why can’t we just track OKRs in a spreadsheet?

You can, but it’s not ideal. A static tracking system in Google Sheets, Google Docs, or Excel puts the onus on you to monitor and update the OKRs manually. With Lattice OKRs & Goals or a similar tool, you can automate your OKR tracking, making it easier for teams to collaborate, see progress, and get real-time updates.

How do OKRs compare with performance objectives?

Performance objectives focus on individual responsibilities and tasks and are typically used as part of an employee’s performance reviews. They are set once or twice a year and are only shared between the employee, their manager, and HR.

OKRs, on the other hand, set ambitious team- and organizational-level goals as well as individual goals. Because they contribute to the strategy of the company as a whole, they should be transparent to all stakeholders.

They also follow a specific format (the objective and the key results that will achieve it) that is different from the typical format of a performance objective. 

How do OKRs compare with key performance indicators?

While both OKRs and key performance indicators (KPIs) are effective tools for managing and monitoring your business performance, they have different uses. 

KPIs typically measure current and ongoing performance against baselines and benchmarks. They provide a continuous indication of how the business is operating. 

OKRs, on the other hand, help teams and organizations drive ambitious growth and change over a set period. They are more flexible and more frequently reviewed and revised to facilitate improvement over time. 

OKRs also have a different format than KPIs. A KPI might be a single business metric or set of metrics, while an OKR is a goal and the steps to achieve it. 

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This OKR is clear, measurable, and focused on a meaningful objective: increasing overall customer satisfaction and retention. The key results provide specific, quantifiable targets and actions that will directly contribute to achieving the objective. 

What are the elements of a good OKR?

The objective should be ambitious but achievable. Key results should be specific, measurable, and actionable, and they should focus more on the outcome than the tasks.

Because OKRs at every level should feed into the organization’s priorities, they should be closely aligned and cascaded across teams, with the organizational key results informing team or department-level objectives, and team results informing individual objectives.

Put this advice into practice with Lattice’s quarterly OKRs template, or request a demo to see how Lattice can help you bring your goals to life.