Create OKR templates for any business.

Two men in an office behind a wooden table looking at a tablet that contains their business’s OKR templates.

Learn how to track your business’s objectives and key results with OKRs templates designed to align your team with quantitative goals.

Every business has goals, but setting them is only the first step. You must also engage your team and align with those goals to grow your business. Tracking objectives and key results (OKRs) is a powerful way to drive alignment, performance, and, ultimately, results.

What are OKR templates?

Objectives and key results (OKR) is a business goal-setting methodology that’s designed to get your entire team on the same page and working toward the same measurable accomplishments. By breaking down larger qualitative goals into smaller quantitative goals, you can drive more alignment and performance from your team, helping to grow your business. By breaking down larger qualitative goals into smaller quantitative goals, you can drive more alignment and performance from your team, helping to grow your business.

An OKRs template is a document that tracks the overall progress of your various business goals — typically in the form of a spreadsheet or fillable table. You can create your OKR template in Google Sheets, Excel, or in PDF form that’s easy for your team to view, edit, and collaborate.

Information to include in an OKR template.

As the name might suggest, OKR templates are broken down into objectives and key results. Objectives are your high-level, typically qualitative goals. They can be goals like “improve sales,” “launch a new product,” or “increase brand awareness.”

Key results are the smaller quantitative and measurable goals that support the larger objective. For example, if your objective is to “improve website SEO,” some of your key results could include “publish four blogs per month,” “generate 10 new inbound links,” and “improve website loading speed.”

Next to each objective and key result in your OKR template should be a progress indicator. You can measure progress with percentages, specific workflow steps, or other ways that work for your business. Just make sure it’s measurable.

It’s also important to include key dates in your OKR template. More specifically, you’ll want at least a start date to mark the beginning of a project or goal and a due date to note the proposed completion time for each goal. Additionally, you should have a column in your OKR templates that assigns each step to a specific person or team. This is important for accountability and to ensure things get done.

How to make an OKR template.

Most businesses prefer to make an OKR template in Google Sheets or Excel. Spreadsheets make it easy to organize all the data you’ll need to track. Plus, you can automate calculations by adding formulas.

Start by labeling your column headings. The first column can be left blank; this is where your objectives and key results will go. Label the following columns with your start date, end date, completion percentage, and assigned team or employee — along with any other metrics you’d like to track.

Next, you can start labeling your rows. The second row should be a high-level objective. Bold the cell to make sure it stands out.

Under each objective, list the key results that correlate with the primary objective. Once you have all the critical results listed, move on to your next objective. Continue down the spreadsheet listing objectives and results as needed.

Your spreadsheet should look like this:

Start date
Due date
Progress
Assigned
Objective 1
Key result 1
Key result 2
Key result 3
Objective 2
Key result 1
Key result 2
Key result 3

Once you create your spreadsheet, saving your template as a PDF is a good idea. PDFs maintain their formatting across devices, ensuring your entire team sees the same template no matter which device they prefer.

You can either save your spreadsheet directly as a PDF or convert Excel to PDF online.

Building spreadsheets isn’t for everyone. If you prefer to start with a predesigned document, you can download an OKRs template for free, typically as a PDF. You can easily customize the PDF template in a PDF editor like Adobe Acrobat or convert PDF to Excel online and edit your template that way.

Additional resources.

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Content as a Service v2 - acrobat-hub - Tuesday, October 24, 2023 at 10:18