Looking at OKR examples will help you to improve your understanding of OKRs, whilst providing inspiration for your own business objectives. OKR examples showcase how OKRs work in practice and you can clearly see how they can be used to grow a business.
Of course, not all examples of OKRs are useful and some won’t be relevant for your business or sector. You’ll need to take a look at a range of different types of OKRs to find options that work best for you.
To help you with this process, we’ve included several great examples in this article and explained what makes them so great! This will give you an idea of how to structure your OKRs and use them to boost your business growth.
Why look at OKR examples?
As touched on above, OKRs examples are designed to inspire and educate. For those new to the OKR process, they can help you to clearly see how OKRs are laid out. Whereas, experienced users can use these examples to fine-tune their objectives and make improvements during their weekly OKR reviews.
OKRs should be created and implemented in a way that’s beneficial for your business and they should be tailored to your exact needs. As a result, your OKRs shouldn’t be a carbon copy of the examples used in this article. But instead, they’ll give you an idea of how to outline objectives and key results that will impact your business growth in a positive way.
Examples of OKRs
OKRs (objectives and key results) help a business pinpoint its desired outcomes and implement measurable ways to know it’s on track. Here are some examples to get you started.
If you were the CEO of a company that sold fitness club franchises, you could take inspiration from one of the following OKR examples:
- To increase the number of clubs by 25%
- To increase profit by 12%
These are both clear overarching objectives for the business. But to keep track of your OKR progress, you would need to look at more than just how many clubs had been opened.
Key results would allow you to drill down in much more detail with specific objectives. For example, objective 1 could be broken down as:
- Select 45 new franchise candidates by March
- Train 35 of them before June
- Sign contracts with 30 of them before September
- Open 25 stores before December
This makes it much easier to keep track of your progress.
Objective 2, focusing on profit, could be broken down as:
- Implement a supplier review to save 10% on equipment for the clubs
- Outsource more of the trainers and reduce costs by 25%
- Launch seasonal campaigns e.g. New Year campaigns to increase membership and double the revenue from the past year.
Your employees would know exactly what they have to do to achieve the goals and how to track progress.
The overarching OKRs could be further broken down for each team too. So under objective 1, the HR team’s objective to select 45 new franchise candidates by March could have the following key results:
- Receive 500 CVs before January
- Select 65 interview candidates by February
- Choose 45 of the interviewees before March
You could do the same for your training, legal, operations or finance teams for the other objectives sitting under objective 1. This makes it clear to everyone what needs to be done and how their results will be measured, which makes it easier to manage teams.
As for objective 2, to increase profit by 12%, if we focus on the objective of launching seasonal campaigns at New Year to increase membership and double revenue compared with past years, you could have the following key results:
- Define a briefing for agencies and submit it by October
- Analyse campaigns by mid-Feb
- Operate on the above-mentioned timescale
Which OKR examples are best for your business?
OKRs can come in all shapes and sizes and that’s part of what makes them so great! You could look at:
- Sales OKR examples
- Marketing OKRs
- Product management OKRs
- Google OKRs
Marketing OKRs are more likely to include key results related to social media followers, organic search traffic, email sign-ups and more. Whereas, football OKRs are often concerned with metrics such as the number of goals, passes, match tickets etc.
It’s all about finding OKR examples that are closely linked to your business and its needs. When used alongside our OKR guides and resources, you’ll have all the information you need to craft impactful OKRs and spur your growth in the right direction.
Putting your OKR examples into practice
Google started using OKRs in 1999 and is a great example of their success, but even they had to learn how to get the most out of them.
Useful questions that will help you embed OKRs into your business are:
- Where do I want to go?
- How will I know that I’m getting there?
To illustrate this, we’ve created the following OKR example. The main objective for a magazine company, for instance, would be to increase recurring revenue. The key results linked to that would be to increase the monthly subscription by 75% or increase the average subscription size by at least £250 per month.
Alternatively, if the objective was to improve internal employee engagement a key result could be to increase the weekly individual satisfaction score of at least 4.8 points, or, obtain feedback scores of 5-6 on the value employees gained from weekly Fun Fridays with an external speaker.
The good thing about OKRs is that they are transparent. Everyone can see what everyone else is working on and how their tasks fit into the overall picture.
OKRs also work at different levels. Not only do they work well for setting specific goals across the company, but they also give each team something to contribute to. This increases motivation and encouragement as everyone is focused on activities that will make a difference to the overall goal with a clearly defined timeframe.
By defining and completing 3 or 5 key result metrics for each objective, you can see how you can increase the likelihood of success and grow your business.
How can TBG help?
Our Giants will support you throughout every step of the OKR process. We can provide in-depth examples of OKRs that would work well for your business and help you implement them effectively.
Alternatively, if you want to benchmark your use of OKRs, we’ll introduce you to our OKR Maturity Model. The OKR/Goal Management Maturity Model has been designed to help you to get an idea of how well your organisation ranks against others who are using OKRs or an alternative goal management tool. The model will provide you with a benchmark and bespoke recommendations on how you can improve.
Let’s make you an OKR Giant – We’ll use our experience, insight and expertise to deliver you a personalised OKR framework and the OKRs you need for maximum impact.