What is an OKR Dashboard?

An OKR Dashboard is a tool that allows you to create easily digestible snapshots of OKR progress, taking in all the necessary data and displaying it in visualizations, such as graphs and charts.

Objectives can be broken down into their respective authorities, such as per employee or per department. This allows you to see areas that need improvement, as well as where things are progressing better than expected.

With OKR Dashboards, you can merge several OKRs into a single visualization, giving you an instant snapshot of the overall progress of the organization. As well as defining the timescale of your snapshot, it makes it easier to assess progress on several timeframes, such as monthly, quarterly, annually, and more.

An Example of a Good OKR

The most effective way to illustrate a concept is by providing examples of that concept in action. To that end, we thought we’d highlight a good example of an OKR to further help you understand the idea.

As we have mentioned already, an OKR should consist of an ambitious objective that can be quantified using multiple key results-often between three and five. For our example, we are going to use three key results.

Objective: Improve Brand Awareness

• Key Result: Work with influencers to drive 1,000 additional sign-ups
• Key Result: Achieve five earned mainstream media placements
• Key Result: Gain 1,000 LinkedIn followers through quality posts

In this example, you can see that the main objective is very vague in and of itself-improving brand awareness could be defined in any number of ways – but with the key results, there are quantifiable indicators of success, along with the roadmap of how to achieve that success. All of these key results provide a numerical representation (342/1000 LinkedIn followers, for example), which means the overall OKR can be represented as a numerical value, such as a percentage.

Of course, the choice of objective needs to be appropriate for your business, and the choice of key results needs to be appropriate for the objective. There would be no sense in a company that does not use LinkedIn adopting the above OKR as it is; OKRs need to be tailored to the organization.

The Benefits of OKRs

Now that you know what an OKR is and how they work let’s take a moment to really spell out the benefits of using OKRs in your organization.

Improved Focus

The main advantage of having clear, quantifiable goals, is that any action can be tested against the simple question; “does this help me reach my goal?” Being able to clearly see how a given task aligns with the goals set out by the OKR not only helps keep your organization on track, it acts as a reassurance to individuals within that organization, as they can always clearly see that they are on the right path.

Improved Collaboration

We mentioned that an OKR should be public, and this is a big part of why. When everyone knows the goals your organization is striving for, it makes it easier for individuals and different departments to collaborate; since everyone knows what the ultimate objective is. In places where objectives overlap, collaboration helps to move things along (not to mention foster a healthier work environment) where blind task-based work keeps people and departments isolated.

Greater Goal Clarity

The ultimate power of OKRs is the ability to mesh personal, departmental, and organization-wide objectives together with measurable results. Seeing how an individual objective fits into the bigger picture helps people understand their role in the overall objective, bringing a greater sense of unity within the organization. Being able to visualize a direct line between a personal OKR and an organization-wide OKR helps people feel valued, as they can see exactly what they are doing to help.