"Are we There Yet?" Tracking Progress Towards your OKRs

OKRs excel over Rocks and other simpler planning tools because they are measurable. OKRs provide specificity around “what done is” for the goals of a given time period, and this clarity improves visibility of progress along the way, enhances team commitment and execution, and ultimately increases the likelihood of implementing meaningful improvements.

Take advantage of these inherent benefits by formally tracking progress towards completion of your OKRs. Continuous monitoring against a specific goal will offer a timely perspective on if you and your team remain on track, regular opportunities to define next steps with your team, and a better ability to reassign work on the fly. Even better, you can see where you are relative to your destination on a shoestring budget, without necessarily having to purchase new OKR software.

Beware, though - even with a well written OKR, the non-stop creep of day-to-day responsibilities and distractions will put your goal at jeopardy. Taking a few easy actions up front and along the way will minimize that risk, leaving you surprised by how smoothly everything has gone. To maximize the likelihood of success, make the following commitments:

1. Define success at the start

2. Track your progress

3. Involve your whole team

1) Define success at the start

Your ability to ultimately track and report on progress through your OKRs each period will be dependent on how clearly defined your OKR is in the first place. Take the time to implement these best practices (click through this to-do list for a refresher on writing great OKRs):

1. Write a KPI-driven Objective if possible

2. Set specific and measurable Key Results

3. Complete your supporting cast - especially target dates

Much of the power of OKRs comes in their specificity. If Objectives and Key Results are well written, then when they are reviewed by anyone who is familiar with your business there should be no ambiguity if they have been completed. Responsibilities should be assigned to specific people, and target dates should be set, not just for the full Objective, but for each Key Result along the way. This allows you to measure progress much more precisely. An OKR is both the final destination of your GPS and the directions along the way; be sure to have those set before posting your trip updates on Instagram.

2) Track Your Progress

It is essential that you have a scoreboard to consistently present your progress each week. Your team will find their efforts to be more gratifying if they can measure how far they’ve come, and you and your peers will benefit by the transparency that a tracking tool offers.

Good news! This doesn’t have to cost you money!

While a lot of great OKR tracking software is available on the market, don’t let a lack of budget for new tools discourage you from introducing OKRs to your business. We’ve been MacGyvering a solution for years. We use Google Sheets that very specifically track progress percentage against each Key Result, rolling up by department and for the Company overall. By including start and end dates for the OKR overall and for each Key Result it is easy for us to see if we’re on track during our weekly meeting

Excel would work fine too - the benefit to Google Sheets is we create a tab for each department in a single file, where team members across the organization can update and share information without worrying about version control.

Download this template from the Resource page and either manage it in Excel or upload to Google Sheets. Enter the required information in the boxes with blue text - in addition to letting you formally document the Objective and Key Results for your team, this also records the other key pieces of information I recommend for successful OKRs, including the Who, the Why, and the When. As you update the completion percentages for your Key Results each week, your overall progress per OKR as well as progress against the time allotted for each of them will be calculated automatically.

Use a standalone sheet for your team only, or create tabs for each department and share it more broadly.

3) Involve your Whole Team

I’ve found the best practice is to set scheduled, recurring meetings with the department. You or your Team Members can present the OKRs through a simple and straightforward agenda:

1. Share what, specifically, was completed last week for each Key Result, and

2. Identify what, specifically, will be completed in the coming week.

It is key that you never leave this conversation without hearing from the responsible Team Member where they expect to be in seven days time. You aren’t micromanaging; you are holding your team accountable and making yourself available to help set priorities or reallocate resources as necessary to reach the agreed upon goal. Employing this tool will help you unlock some of the superpowers that make OKRs so valuable.

Focus and Commit to Priorities:

Discussing these specific, short-term deliverables with your group enhances the sense of commitment and accountability, and reduces the likelihood that you and the team are racing at the conclusion of the period to make up for lost time. The unrelenting avalanche of day-to-day work comes for us all, regardless of role or seniority. A natural response to being overwhelmed is to delay the special projects and new tasks that typically make up Key Results in favor of more immediately pressing obligations. Holding weekly check-ins is the first line of defense to protect your OKRs. If timing starts to slip, you have immediate visibility and can provide direction to your team on what to prioritize.

Align and Connect for Teamwork:

OKRs are a team sport. Even in departments of individual contributors, the best OKRs drive outcomes that can be measured across the entire group and benefit everyone. Therefore, progress towards those outcomes should be shared and discussed with the entire team. These conversations also support increased engagement, by clearly linking short-term assignments with broader priorities and benefits for the time.

Moreover, group discussions allow real-time reallocation of work in order to accommodate the Key Results you are trying to accomplish. We have found that Team Members often raise their hand to help each other so that both day-to-day and OKR-related responsibilities can be completed on time.

Finally, use this as an opportunity to give your team members a chance to shine. Well defined Key Results provide a clear road map to your team, and we often find that employees will use the direction that the OKR provides to step up without much additional prompting. They are often eager to grab specific tasks, coordinate with each other, and proudly present their week’s accomplishments in front of the team.

(Sidebar on Meetings)

I appreciate that we’re all wary of adding additional meeting time to the calendar. These updates are normally short (10 minutes) and can be included within existing team meetings. Keeping track of progress through regular, brief updates will also typically avoid the need for the longer catch up meetings required at the end of the period should you fall behind.

Your Turn

The easiest path to improving success in your OKRs is by implementing each of these three steps. Honestly audit your internal process from the last period and grade yourself on these three activities. Which were you best at? Where did you fall short? Start with your weakest score, and one at a time adopt the best practices from above.

If you’re starting your OKR process from scratch, and you’re wondering which of these is the most important, I would take these exactly in the order in which they have been presented.

1. Ensure that you are creating strong OKRs (Step 1). Well written Objectives and Key Results will help keep your team on track by themselves.

2. From there, download the Excel template and start tracking progress each week, even if you’re the only one reviewing that sheet (Step 2). Ensure that your Key Results are well defined enough to allow you to assess and update a progress percentage each week.

3. Once you have a well written OKR and you know you can track progress against it, you will then feel confident that adding 5-10 minutes of weekly meeting time with your team will have the payoff you need to further ensure completion of your stated goals (Step 3).