OKRs in your company: how to set strategic goals and track them in monday.com or Jira

OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results. An objective describes in words what the company wants to change in the coming quarter. Key results are two to four numbers that will tell you objectively whether it has succeeded.

The method does not replace the standing indicators you track every month, such as revenue, margin or stock turnover. These indicators, often called KPIs, show how the company is performing day to day. OKRs point to a few areas that should improve noticeably this quarter.

A simple test: if an indicator is meant to stay at the same level, it is a KPI. If it is meant to change and that requires extra work from several people, it is a good candidate for a key result. We have summarised the differences in the table below.

An objective should be short, understandable to every employee and concern something important to customers or the company. A key result must be a number with a starting point, a target value and a deadline. If you cannot say at the end of the quarter whether it has been achieved, it is badly written.

Take a hypothetical manufacturing company with 120 employees that is losing customers because of delays. Its objective for the quarter might be: “Customers receive their orders on the promised date.” The key results might look like those in the table below.

The most common mistake when writing key results is listing tasks instead of outcomes. “Implement a new production planning system” is a task. The key result is what that system is supposed to improve, such as order lead time.

At Google, each key result is scored at the end of the quarter on a scale from 0 to 1. Objectives there are deliberately ambitious, and a score of 0.6–0.7 is considered good. If someone consistently scores 1.0, it is a sign that their objectives were too easy.

This approach only works when everyone knows that 70% is a success, not a failure. In a company where objectives have so far meant a plan to be delivered 100%, a sudden change of rules breeds distrust. That is why in the first quarters it is better to set realistic objectives, adding ambitious ones gradually and labelling them clearly.

A second principle from Google’s guide: OKRs are not an employee appraisal. If the score on an objective affects a bonus, people write safe objectives. Base bonuses on an overall assessment of performance, and treat OKRs as a tool for setting priorities.

In large corporations, objectives cascade down several levels: company, department, team and sometimes individual. In a company with 50–250 employees, two levels are usually enough: company objectives and department objectives. More levels mean more meetings, but not necessarily better results.

Cascading objectives is not copying them. The sales department does not rewrite the company’s objective; it answers the question of what it must change itself for the company to achieve it. Some of a department’s objectives may come from its own needs, such as cleaning up customer data.

Combining the two directions works best. The management board proposes company objectives, and department managers respond with proposals for their own. Everyone then agrees them at a single meeting, rather than exchanging versions by email for several weeks.

Most OKR rollouts do not end with a conscious decision, but by being quietly forgotten. Objectives written at a workshop never come up at another meeting, and after a quarter nobody remembers what they were. So put the review rhythm in the calendar straight away, for the whole quarter.

This does not require new meetings. A short review of objectives can be added to existing team and management board meetings. The table below shows a sensible rhythm for a mid-sized company.

For the first quarter, a shared Excel spreadsheet or a SharePoint list is enough. It lets you check whether the company can keep up the review rhythm before spending money on a tool. The drawback of a spreadsheet is that numbers have to be copied in manually from other systems.

If your company works in monday.com, objectives and key results can be tracked on a separate board using a ready-made OKR template. Each key result can be linked to project boards, and progress can be gathered on a single results dashboard. Employees then see the objectives in the same place where they work every day.

In Jira, objectives are created in Atlassian Home, Atlassian’s shared space for goals and projects, and then linked to specific tasks. Jira Align is a separate, extensive product for large organisations with many software development teams, and a mid-sized company rarely needs it. Companies on Microsoft 365 no longer have a Microsoft tool of their own for this, because Viva Goals was retired at the end of 2025.

OKRs help when the company has real choices to make and the management board is ready to say what it is not doing this quarter. If all existing priorities are to stay and OKRs are only meant to describe them nicely, it is better to stick with a good budget and a few indicators.

Nor will the method help a company that lacks reliable data. If on-time delivery cannot be measured, a key result based on that number will be fiction. In that case, the first objective should be to sort out the data. Typical mistakes in the first year:

Treat the first quarter as a chance to learn the method, not as a test of whether the company can hit ambitious results. More important than the numbers is whether the review rhythm survives until the end of the quarter.

The plan might look like this: