Tracking company goals is the top priority for any business looking to expand market share, maximize profits, or increase stakeholder value. These things do not happen by chance. Savvy leaders encourage, inspire, and support team members with benchmarks and key performance indicators (KPI’s) to ensure they reach the objectives that support company wide goals. Many businesses and employees are accustomed to using excel spreadsheets as they are easily accessible and readily available.

Unfortunately, rows and rows of data do not support workforce alignment. To ensure every team member can fully comprehend and visualize the strategic objectives that facilitate organizational success, effective supervisors implement the use of an OKR template.

Why Use an OKR Template?

Objectives and Key Results (OKR) templates act as a catalyst for growth and success by tracking and measuring what matters most in a meaningful way. Many of the flourishing tech giants that we know today adopted the OKR framework early on. Not only does an OKR template help companies plan objectives and implement execution, but it also helps evaluate performance along the way. By aligning team members and departments with organizational goals while consistently measuring progress, companies can reach ambitious objectives very quickly. This can only be done with an OKR template.

Excel spreadsheets aren’t scalable or sustainable for these purposes because they have been specifically designed to crunch numbers. Continuously adding team members and departmental goals to a spreadsheet means that you end up with thousands of rows of data which does nothing to drive performance or measure progress. You can’t effectively manage or evaluate team performance with an excel spreadsheet.

Don’t Let Spreadsheet Headaches Impede Your Company Progress

Spreadsheets offer a limited ability for team members to measure their goals and progress against organizational objectives making it impossible for them to know if they are on the right track. Their cumbersome maintenance takes precious time away from more important productive activities that benefit the company, unnecessarily prolonging the road to success. Spreadsheets are also prone to data entry and duplication errors rendering them nearly useless for aiding in timely team member feedback.

It is extremely difficult and nearly futile for managers to attempt to measure Key Results progress with a simple excel spreadsheet. They offer no departmental or company-wide alignment making it paradoxically impossible for the entire team to simultaneously support and move toward organizational benchmarks in a meaningful way. Spreadsheets cannot provide a real-time glimpse of OKR progress or show red flag warnings of potential problems on the horizon like an OKR template can.

Promote Success from Within

Implementing the use of an OKR template not only promotes higher order goals from within your company, but it allows each team member to see their specific impact on your entire organization. This type of wider field of vision is impossible to achieve using any type of excel spreadsheet and it encourages higher achievement by each individual within your company. If your organizational goals include maximizing profits, expanding market share, or increasing stakeholder value, then you need an OKR template to help you do it.