Goals and Key Results (OKRs for short) are a great way to turn your company’s overarching goals into concrete outcomes. The technique has been around since his 70s, but has exploded in popularity recently as big companies like Spotify, Uber, and Google openly use it to continuously drive desired results is increasing.
But you don’t have to be a Silicon Valley tech giant to benefit from the introduction of OKRs. These are also great for small businesses, and you can use our free OKR template Google Sheets file to get started getting ready to add this growth technique to your company.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at how OKRs can help your business, how to use templates, and what’s under the hood. Read on to strengthen your business with goals and key results.
Contents
Download Our OKR Spreadsheet Template
Click here to download Spreadsheet Point’s free OKR spreadsheet template.
This template has everything you need to track OKRs in your business. Each sheet in the template allows you to enter your own goals, key outcomes, and related efforts to help your team stay on track.
It will also automatically update the total target results for each section for the desired period.
Objectives vs. Key Results
Simply put, a goal is a goal for a specified period of time, and key outcomes are tangible data points that drive measurable progress toward that goal. The goals are qualitative, but the key results are quantitative.
The goal should also be somewhat provocative. For example, ‘become the world’s largest manufacturer of product X’ is better than ‘increase sales.”
Let’s take a closer look at an example. You can set a company-wide goal of “establishing the largest online presence in the industry.” This is a good goal for modern businesses, but it’s not really measurable.
Therefore, goals should be combined with clear, well-defined metrics (key outcomes). Examples of important results combined with this specific purpose include:
- Post 500 on Instagram
- Post 150 blog posts
- Get 10 Dr55+ backlinks
As you can see in the example, important results should be easy to measure. This is also useful for templates as each must be entered as a percentage. For example, if your key result is “500 posts on Instagram” and your company has posted 200 of them so far:
200/500 x 10 = 40%
This means that the team is 40% of the way to achieving key results.
Primary results must also comply with SMART criteria stating that:
- Be specific – achieve your goals precisely
- Measurable – be quantitative in nature
- Assignable – select specific teams or employees
- Realistic – it should be in the realm of possibility
- Time-related – assign exact timeframes
Feel free to aim high with your key results, but make sure it’s achievable. When using OKRs, more than 75% of the total results are generally considered successful.
Initiatives
Initiatives can be used to support key outcomes. Consider these to be the main results for the main results. These are small tasks that show progress towards key metrics. In many cases they are still specific percentage-based numbers.
Using the “make 500 posts on Instagram” example above, an initiative might be “conduct employee social media training for five members of the marketing team.”
What Is the Difference Between KPI and OKR?
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are often confused with OKRs. Both are performance measures and work in a similar way, but there are differences in approach, reporting and functionality.
KPIs are built around reporting results and are a way to measure the success of a team, employee or project. It may also be used for an extended period of time or indefinitely as your business grows.
OKRs, on the other hand, focus on achieving short-term (usually quarterly) goals.
You can also include some KPIs in your OKR spreadsheet. For example, if one of the company’s goals is “Increase his profit by 12%”, his related KPI-related goals such as “Make potential new customers his X calls” You can set key outcomes for your marketing team.”
KPIs are often used as measures of performance, but OKRs should be close to goals. Because OKRs are short-term and aimed at improving your business, using them as a performance measure can lead to the classic “underperforming and overperforming” mentality.
Free Google Sheets Profit and Loss Template
The Setup of the OKR Google Sheet Template
This template has four sheets:
- Company-level OKRs
- Team-level OKRs
- Individual OKRs
- Company-level OKR dashboard
The first three sheets are basically the same, so I won’t explain how to use each sheet in the template separately. Team sheets and personal sheets are there to make copies for each team in your company and as many employees as you need. To create these copies:
- Right click on the sheet at the bottom of the page
- click on duplicate
- Double click on the name of the new sheet to rename it
It’s a good idea to name the sheet after the team or employee (for example, John Smith’s Q4 OKRs.
Using the OKR Tracking Template Sections
Now that you know more about using OKRs, let’s take a look at how the free templates work.
Basic Data
Each sheet has a space to enter your company name, team name, or employee name. There is also room to add your company’s mission statement or slogan, as well as the time period for which the OKR spreadsheet template applies.
Objectives and Key Results Template Sections
The next part you need to fill in is the heart of your OKR plan. Goals and key results themselves. As you can see in the spreadsheet above, you can place your goals in the purple box at the top, followed by your key results in the four rows.
Under the progress column heading, enter a percentage number for each key outcome.
You may have noticed the little red triangle in the Total Objective Fulfillment box. This indicates an error in your Google Sheets formula, but don’t worry. It only exists because it updates automatically, and the progress column has no data yet.
You may also see the exact error #DIV/0! This basically says that the function cannot divide by 0.
When I add the picture the error disappears like this:
The screenshot above also shows that you can use conditional formatting within a cell to see at a glance how well key outcomes are met. The following conditional formatting is applied to these cells:
- Red – 15% or less
- Yellow – 16% to 74%
- Green – 75% or higher
As mentioned earlier, 75% or more is a good result if you have your key outcomes set correctly. However, you and your team should try to get out of the red zone as quickly as possible.
Adding Initiatives in the Google Sheet OKR Template
We’ve also added a section for adding initiatives that help you track your steps towards key results. You can see that there is a progress column but no totals at the bottom. This is because not all efforts need to be quantitative, and fulfillment of all efforts does not necessarily mean 100% coverage of key outcomes.
Total Average Progress in the OKR Sheet Template
The template automatically calculates your average progress towards your goals over time. This is done using the AVERAGE function. This function retrieves data from cells F11, F20, and F29, which are goal achievement total cells in each sheet of the Google Sheets OKR template.
The Dashboard in the OKR Tracker Template
Includes a dashboard for enterprise-level OKRs. This dashboard makes it easy for the CEO and his team leaders to see progress in the shortest possible time. It also makes it much easier to discuss objectives and key outcomes in meetings when all the data is presented in bar charts and pie charts.
This part of the OKR template updates automatically, so you don’t need to touch it. It simply exists to visualize the growth of your company. It’s not just the graph itself that gets updated. Titles and headings are taken from other sheets in the template and reflect any changes you make there.
If you’d like to add a dashboard for yourself or your team, check out our great article on how to create a simple dashboard in Google Sheets.
OKR Template FAQs
What is an OKR Template?
OKRs, short for Objectives and Key Results, are a way to track a business’ progress in a particular area. An OKR template is a pre-made document that makes this tracking easy.
How Do You Track OKR in Google Sheets?
There are several ways to track your OKRs in Google Sheets, but the easiest way is to use a template like this article.
How Do I Make an OKR Spreadsheet?
Even if you don’t want to use the template completely, you can use it as a guide. If you’re building your own, all you need to do is include a place to store your goals and key results, and a place to track your progress. The data can then be aggregated using the AVERAGE function.
Get Tracking
We hope the OKR Template Google Sheets Guide is helpful for you and your business. Contact your team frequently to check on progress and adjust your next period based on your team’s performance. If you have any questions about the template or OKRs, feel free to drop us a line in the comments.
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