A guide to objectives and key results (OKRs)

An Objective is what you want to achieve, and a Key Result is how you plan to measure that you have achieved your Objective. Monitoring your OKRs will help you to celebrate success and identify any barriers to overcome.

What are OKRs?

An objective is what you want to achieve and is always qualitative and aspirational. They are something that the organisation or team aims to achieve (not numbers based). Whereas key results are always qualitative and tell you if you’ve achieved your objective because they are measurable. You usually have 3-5 key results per objectives.

An example of OKRs

If your objective is to improve your fitness in 2021, your key results could be:

Run 100k this winter
Complete six sporting events in 2021
Do Joe Wicks HIT workouts 4x per week

Each OKR will have a ‘cadence’ (timeframe) which could be monthly, quarterly, annually etc. This is the period after which you hope to have achieved the objective.