About this template
As the project quarterback, it’s your job to run the show and know how your projects contribute to your company’s overall goals. You’ll present the team’s progress to your managers, allocate and organize resources, and ensure you meet deadlines. But what if all this information gets buried under conversations spread out across several communication tools? The result is an intricately tangled web that derails the entire project and lowers team morale.
The best way to avoid the dreaded project cobweb is by tracking objectives and key results with our objective and key results (OKR) template.
What is an OKR template?
Our OKR template is a powerful starting point that enables your team and organization to set objectives and track key results on one intuitive, standardized document. This tool allows your team to instantly access one source of truth, define project roles, track progress, and view objectives using the OKR format for setting goals. Using a customizable format, teams can create a template that:
- Lists each objective and the corresponding key result
- Organizes files and other relevant data
- Includes a space for team members to ask questions and communicate
The beauty of our OKRs template is that it’s built for collaboration while keeping a cohesive, organized structure — though its value can easily extend beyond that, too.
The benefits of our OKR planning template
Streamlined objectives
Redefine how your team measures and achieves success with our team OKR template. Use this template to enhance productivity, improve planning processes, and elevate product management practices. With it, every team can set clear objectives and track their progress effectively, ensuring that everyone is working toward the company’s vision and focused on the most important outcomes.
Centralized documentation
The real value of our OKR template is it’s all in one place. You can consolidate all the critical information in your easily accessible canvas. That means colleagues can view and manage the team’s objectives, key results, and related data without the hassle of navigating through multiple documents or systems. By having a single source of truth, teams can save valuable time and reduce the complexity often associated with tracking progress, making the OKR planning process more efficient and less prone to errors.
Quarterly progress tracking
A unique aspect of our OKR template is its ability to keep track of progress and key results on a quarterly basis. This structured timeline encourages regular reviews and adjustments, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and agility within teams. By evaluating progress systematically, teams can quickly identify areas where they’re excelling or need more focus. That translates to timely interventions that keep projects on track and team OKRs within reach.
Clarity and accountability
The template not only facilitates the setting of clear objectives but also ensures precise definition of expected results and designation of directly responsible individuals (DRIs). This clarity in roles and expectations eliminates ambiguity and enhances accountability among team members. Each person knows exactly what is expected of them, what you want to achieve, and how their efforts contribute to the team’s overall success and company goals. Clear expectations drive engagement and motivation across the entire organization.
Now that we know how a template helps your team reach its goals and contribute to the business’s success, let’s explore how to make the OKR goal-setting template by Slack work for you.
How to use our OKR framework template
Organize all goals — team, department, and organization — into one monthly or quarterly OKR template. This customizable document works for any team wanting to track and measure their milestones against the company’s goals in an easily accessible, customizable shared canvas format. Here’s how to get started:
First, introduce this template as the central hub for project information during the team all-hands meeting to discuss the upcoming project. Explain the goal-setting framework and how you’ll use the elements of the OKR scorecard template. Then fill out the details below to align everyone on the same page, track your progress, and rally around top priorities.
The project end date
Type the project end date at the top of the template. This is one of the most important details as it gives everyone a clear reminder of what they need to accomplish before the project wraps on a specific date. Not only does this help individuals stay on track and aligned, but it keeps motivation high.
Your objectives and key results
This is the ‘what’ of the project that explains what your team is going to do. You can list out your objectives and key results in list form, the formatted OKR table, or both to communicate the goal and specific, measurable outcomes that show your progress towards reaching the objective. Here’s an example:
- Objective: Boost brand recognition
- Key result: Place three content pieces in other online publications
A FAQ section for team members
If your team hasn’t worked within the OKR framework before, it’s common to have questions about what it is and how it will work. Answer those at the meeting, but use the template as a resource they’ll return to whenever they need. Write down the answers to their questions as well as commonly asked inquiries in the FAQ section to create a self-service hub that saves time.
Files, uploads, and pictures
Think of the OKR reporting template as your one source of truth for all project details. This includes objectives and key results, but also any context that will help team members contribute to the organization’s overarching goals. Let’s continue with the goal example to “boost brand recognition.” You can attach a company-wide meeting presentation that addresses the quarter’s goals, links to which publications you want to appear in, a checklist for each key result, and so on.
Tag team members
Assign team members tasks, alert them to upcoming due dates and progress updates, and keep everyone in the loop with the Slack tagging function. If each team member is responsible for an objective, tag them right on the OKR goal setting template so that everyone knows what their responsibilities are. Seeing tasks and ownership laid out clearly drives motivation, increases accountability, and eliminates task overlap.
Third-party integrations to complement OKR goal setting template
Keep your team even more accountable to the organization’s OKRs by utilizing third-party integrations. Integrations give them all the tools they need right from the OKR goal-setting template to empower their best work. Save time, energy, and boost productivity by accessing your favorite apps from one place. The options are endless when it comes to integrations, but here are a few ideas to get you started.
OneDrive
No more wasting time repeatedly opening OneDrive to share resources with the team. Search, share, and preview team documents right from the OKR format template. As a team lead, you can also automatically adjust permissions giving the right individuals access, ideal for cross-team collaborations.
We’ve all made the mistake of sending a link without updating the permission settings. The OneDrive integration checks whether everyone in the conversation has access when you share a file and automatically offers to update the link if they don’t.
ClickUp
Integrate Slack with ClickUp to ensure maximum transparency and alignment on all project tasks, status updates, documentation, and more. Use ClickUp to create a new task right from your OKR and KPI template. Slack will notify the assignee and the rest of the team about their task to let everyone know which person owns each initiative. Share task updates from ClickUp to inform your entire team of progress, and post any link from the app in Slack to show important details such as task priority.
Notion
No need to toggle back and forth between apps to get your work done. Create a Notion task by sending a Slack message to the Notion database, and avoid communication overload by deciding which notifications get sent to your team’s Slack. No one will remember to click on a link if there’s zero context around it. Notion’s integrations encourage regular views of the quarterly tracking OKR review template by using AI to add summaries to links.
