As a business owner in a competitive environment, you must know what you want to achieve and why it matters.
At the same time, you must work hard and define what success looks like and what it will take you to get there. In this case, you must develop measurable key results.
Traditionally, business teams have relied on objectives and key results (OKRs) to understand their goals and how they can achieve them. Using this success framework, you pair objectives with key results to understand your achievements.
Unfortunately, most business owners have very little or no clue about objectives and key results success framework.
What is an OKR Template?
OKR (Objectives and Key Results) templates work as a performance management system to provide a framework for setting team objectives and tracking results.
Whether you’re a small or large organization, it pays to clearly understand your company objectives so everyone is working toward the same goals. To further break it down, objectives are specific goals you want to achieve, while key results are the metrics used to measure your progress.
For example, let’s say your objective is to increase sales by 20% in the next quarter. Your key results could be increasing web traffic by 10%, generating 50 new leads, or closing 10 new deals.
If you’re new to OKRs, check out our video for practical writing tips!
The Benefits of Tracking Your OKRs
As a business owner, it’s easy to get distracted by shiny objects and other things that aren’t important. With OKRs, you can keep your team focused on the things that matter most. You want to direct your energy in areas that can create an impact on your business rather than wasting time on things that won’t move the needle.
You must ensure that everyone in your organization is aligned with your company’s vision and goals. With OKRs, you can engage your team and get them excited about working toward a common goal.
Improving transparency and accountability
In any team, transparency and accountability are crucial to success. Unfortunately, achieving these things is challenging without the proper framework in place. OKRs assist your team in understanding their roles and responsibilities. It also helps you to hold everyone accountable for their actions.
Additionally, any delay in decision-making can be costly. You want your team to be able to make decisions quickly without sacrificing quality. Objectives and key results play a critical role in facilitating faster decision-making.
Quickly identify the areas that need attention and make decisions accordingly. It benefits to keep your organization agile and responsive to changes in the market.
Boosting performance
The ultimate role of any OKR is to improve performance. When everyone in your organization understands their objectives and key results, they’ll be more likely to work harder to achieve them.
This framework also allows you to track progress and identify areas that need improvement. Aligning your team’s efforts with your company’s goals will help you to achieve excellent results.
Creating a solid objective and key results framework starts with clearly understanding what you want your organization to achieve and how you’ll measure success. Although business owners will find it easier to establish their business objectives and key results, it’s always a challenge when it comes to putting all your OKRs in one view.
Fortunately, there are OKR templates you can use to align your whole team toward the same vision.
Here are seven free OKR templates you should consider right now!
7 Free OKR Templates You Need to Try Right Now
1. ClickUp Company OKR Template
ClickUp is a productivity platform where teams come together to plan, organize, and collaborate on work in one place. And with ClickUp’s Company OKRs and Goals template, managers have the option to create tasks and link them to a key result. It will no longer be an administrative burden on team members to send weekly status emails because as the task progresses, it’s automatically tracked within the template!
An OKR system in ClickUp will transform the way teams and senior leadership communicate their top priorities. It ties strategic planning to actionable steps so every key result contributor understands how their performance directly affects the outcome. Start next quarter’s OKR planning today!
2. ClickUp OKR Framework Template
The ClickUp OKR Framework Template is an excellent starting point for OKRs. It includes both a pre-defined OKR framework and workspaces to help you start planning your OKRs quickly and easily. The template comes with customizable OKR templates, a goal setting guide, and even sample OKRs. You’ll also get access to the OKR checklist and OKR playbook, which provide best practices for implementing OKRs in your organization. All the pieces of this OKR template work together to help you quickly get up and running with OKRs.
Understanding your team’s OKR framework is the key to successful OKR execution. This template helps you quickly establish and configure OKRs that are tailored specifically for your team’s unique needs. This OKR template includes all the visual tools, workspaces, and resources needed to make sure everyone understands their OKRs and is working towards them in an effective way.
3. ClickUp Strategic Marketing OKR Template
ClickUp’s Strategic Marketing OKR Template provides a comprehensive OKR framework for strategic marketing teams. It includes OKRs specifically designed to improve the visibility and reach of your brand in the market, build customer loyalty, and increase sales. With this OKR template, you’ll get access to resources such as goal setting guidelines, OKR definitions, OKR templates, OKR checklists, and OKR playbooks. This OKR template is a great starting point for marketing teams wanting to get the best results out of OKRs.
4. Google Sheets OKR Tracking Template
Google Sheets has a simple OKR template to start organizing each key result for the entire organization. It helps managers track the team’s progress toward quarterly objectives.
All you need to do is enter your objectives and a few key results into the appropriate columns. You can then visualize the status of each key result by color-coding the cells. This will help you see which areas need attention. Small business owners are already using this template to improve their productivity and achieve their goals!
5. Excel OKR Tracking Template
Over the years, Microsoft Excel has become one of the most popular tools for tracking OKRs. This is because it’s easy to use and provides much flexibility. You can easily customize your OKRs to suit your unique needs. If you want to track your progress visually, you can use sparklines or charts.
The best thing about using Excel to track your OKRs is you can share your progress with others. You can also use this tool to set reminders and add notes.
6. PowerPoint OKR Template
This is another excellent option for small businesses or startups. The OKR PowerPoint template is easy to use and helps you to track your progress over time.
Using this template, you must enter your objectives and key results into the appropriate slides. You can then track your progress by highlighting the cells achieved. This will help you to see which areas need improvement.
Businesses looking for a planning template that is easy to use and visually appealing can go for the OKR PowerPoint template.
7. Google Sheets OKR Dashboard Template
You must avoid a situation where you must go back and forth between different tools to set reminders or add notes. The Google Sheets template alleviates this challenge by allowing you to do everything in one place.
This tool has been in the market for a while and is known for its user-friendliness. With this template, you must ensure that you enter the objectives and key results in the appropriate columns. After that, you can easily track progress by highlighting achieved cells. Doing this will help identify areas that need more work.
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Be Better Than ‘OK’ and Start With a Detailed OKR Template
Having a clear approach to assessing your results and determining whether your business is truly performing to expectations is essential for organizational success. An objective and key results framework through an OKR template helps you to measure and assess your results with respect to your objectives.
It lets you know whether you’re making the right decisions and how you can improve your operations to reflect your performance. ClickUp’s Company OKR Template is the perfect place to start!
This easy-to-use template will quickly generate the necessary results for comparison purposes. So what are you waiting for? Sign up for a free ClickUp account today to get started.
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