Most organizations treat OKR evaluation like a formality, a quick glance at numbers and then move on to the next quarter. However, a strong OKR Strategy for Evaluation is essential for ensuring long-term success.
Research shows that 64% of companies fail to achieve their strategic objectives because they never properly evaluate what went wrong or right.
Your OKRs deserve better than a checkbox.
Why Evaluating OKRs is More than a Checkbox: OKR Strategy for Evaluation
You didn’t set those objectives just to forget about them. Yet that’s exactly what happens when evaluation becomes an afterthought.
Without proper evaluation, you’re driving blind, repeating the same mistakes, missing critical insights and wasting your team’s effort on goals that don’t matter.
An OKR Strategy for Evaluation turns OKRs into a learning system. It reveals why you succeeded, why you failed and what to change. Companies that do structured OKR evaluations see 30% higher goal achievement rates than those that don’t. It’s not luck, it’s discipline.
When you skip evaluation, you lose the connective tissue between cycles. Your next quarter’s OKRs become guesswork instead of informed strategy.
You can’t improve what you don’t measure and you can’t learn from what you don’t examine.
When Should You Evaluate OKRs?
Timing matters. You need three evaluation touchpoints: mid-cycle check-ins, end-of-cycle reviews and retrospective analysis.
Mid-cycle evaluations happen at the 50% mark, typically six weeks into a quarterly cycle. This isn’t about scoring yet. It’s about course correction.
Are your key results still relevant?
Is progress on track?
Do you need to pivot?
Studies show that teams that do mid-cycle reviews are 2.5 times more likely to achieve their objectives because they catch problems early. This is a key component of a successful OKR strategy for evaluation, ensuring teams stay aligned and on track.
End-of-cycle evaluations happen within one week of the cycle’s close. This is your formal scoring and analysis session. Memories are fresh, data is available and you can capture honest reflections before everyone moves on.
Retrospective analysis happens shortly after end-of-cycle evaluation. This deeper dive examines patterns across multiple cycles, identifies systemic issues and informs strategic planning. Think of it as your OKR intelligence gathering.
Step-by-Step OKR Evaluation Framework
Start by collecting all the relevant data you’ll need to evaluate your OKRs. This means gathering all the key metrics, project outcomes and qualitative feedback before your evaluation meeting.
There’s nothing quite as demotivating as having to rummage through your notes while trying to have a productive conversation.
Next, score each key result on its own merits, using the OKR Strategy for Evaluation system you laid out first. We’ll look at that in a minute, and be sure to compare the actual result against the target. And here’s the thing: ‘we got there mostly’ isn’t a score, it’s a pretty vague statement.
Dig into why you achieved the numbers you did. Was the target too easy? Did shifting priorities knock you off track? Getting into the why behind the numbers can turn raw scores into real action points.
Identify the things you learned from the process. What worked? What didn’t? What surprised you? Write these down as you go. It’s a lot easier to remember them that way.
Research from Harvard Business School tells us that teams that write down their takeaways improve their performance by 25% the next time around.
Then there’s the overall objective score, simply average out the scores for each key result. But don’t forget: it’s not just about the number, the story behind it is just as important.
A score of 0.7, with loads of learning to show for it, will probably beat out a 1.0 with no real insights.
Finally, get the results out to the rest of the organization. OKR Strategy for Evaluation isn’t something that should be done in secret. When you share the results widely, it creates accountability and lets teams learn from each other’s successes and failures.
OKR Strategy for Evaluation: OKR Scoring Explained
Most teams use a standard 0 to 1 scoring system. Here’s what each bit of the range actually means:
0 to 0.3
You really didn’t do well. Either the objective was way too ambitious, something went seriously wrong, or priorities changed completely.
Don’t worry, this happens. Just try to work out what went wrong.
0.4 to 0.6
You made some good progress, but didn’t quite get there. This often means you were trying to do something pretty ambitious, but had some problems with execution. It’s not a disaster, it’s just data.
0.7 to 0.9
This is where the magic happens. You got some really good results while still pushing yourself to do better.
Google sets their targets to hit this range because it suggests they’re setting themselves challenging but achievable goals.
1.0
Perfect, sounds great. But ask yourself: was the goal really challenging? If you’re consistently hitting 1.0, then you might not be aiming high enough. Research shows that high-performing teams tend to average about 0.7 to 0.8 over multiple cycles.
Some teams prefer to use a simple traffic light system: red (at risk), yellow (needs some work), green (on track). Pick whatever works for you, but make sure you stick to the same system each time so that you can compare results properly.
How to Measure Qualitative Objectives
Not everything can be turned into a number. Satisfying your customers, keeping your team happy and perceiving your brand in a certain way all require a slightly different approach.
First, define what you’re aiming for. Before you start, figure out what good looks like. With an OKR Strategy for Evaluation, you can ensure clarity in what success looks like for your business. ‘Improve customer satisfaction’ is a pretty vague goal. What does that actually mean?
Try to make it specific: ‘Increase NPS score from 32 to 45’ or ‘Cut support ticket resolution time to under 4 hours’.
Then find some proxy metrics that give you something to measure. Can’t measure innovation directly? Keep track of how many patents you file, how fast you can get new features out the door or how many experiments you run. These give you some real numbers to work with.
Get some feedback from your customers, or whoever it is that you’re trying to measure. Run some surveys, have a chat with them or set up a focus group.
Then turn their opinions into something you can measure. A score based on 50 customer interviews is way more useful than a score based on a gut feeling.
Finally, use milestones to break down big, vague objectives into something you can measure. For an OKR strategy for evaluation, ‘Build a world-class engineering team’ might mean things like implementing a recognition scheme for your engineers, launching some mentorship programs, and reducing voluntary turnover. Score based on milestone achievement.
Tools for OKR Evaluation: Choosing the Right One
The tool you pick will really make or break how effective your evaluation is. Now, for small teams, spreadsheets work just fine, but once you go above 20 people, things can get pretty unwieldy.
That’s when you need a dedicated OKR platform like Gtmhub, Lattice or Workboard, which can automate the tracking, show you the big picture and just make things run smoother.
You want a few key features from your tool especially if you’re implementing an OKR Strategy for Evaluation. It’s got to collect data automatically from all your existing systems, show you the progress in real time, allow you to score projects together as a team, compare things over time and give you super flexible reporting options.
Don’t let the complexity of your tool become an excuse.
A lot of teams link their OKR tools to their project management systems, analytics platforms and communication tools (oh, and it’s worth noting it saves you tonnes of manual data entry and ensures your evaluations are based on reality rather than just guesses).
Who Should Get Involved in OKR Evaluation?
The owner of the objective is usually the one leading the evaluation, but they shouldn’t do it on their own. You also want to bring in anyone who helped set the OKR, so your cross-functional partners, team members and any stakeholders who’ll be impacted by the outcome.
Leadership gets involved in evaluating company-level OKRs, but they shouldn’t call all the shots or try to overrule your scores.
Research from Deloitte has shown that when leaders dominate the evaluation process, it actually reduces team ownership and makes future performance worse.
If your OKRs are directly impacting customers or external partners, then get them involved in the evaluation too. Their input can give you some much-needed perspective and highlight things your team hasn’t thought of.
This approach aligns with an effective OKR Strategy for Evaluation, ensuring you consider all relevant viewpoints and areas for improvement.
Just remember to keep your evaluation sessions focused, 60 to 90 minutes max. Anything longer will just wear people out and you’ll get less quality out of your reflection time.
Real Example: Actually Evaluating a Completed OKR
Alright, let’s say we’re at a software company and we’re evaluating this actual OKR:
Objective: Give our enterprise sales a speed boost
- Result 1: Reduce sales cycle from 90 to 60 days, we managed 72 days (Score: 0.6)
- Result 2: Get each enterprise deal up to $75k, we actually got to $68K (Score: 0.72)
- Result 3: Close 15 enterprise deals (up from 8 last quarter), we closed 12 deals (Score: 0.57)
Overall Objective Score: 0.63
Analysis
We made some progress but we really didn’t hit our targets. The sales cycle reduction didn’t go as well as we thought because we didn’t anticipate that the legal review process would become a bottleneck like it did.
But we did get the deal sizes up as planned, because our better qualification process worked a charm. Unfortunately, the deal volume fell short because one big prospect pushed their deal to the next quarter.
Lessons Learned from OKR Strategy for Evaluation
Need to get some dedicated legal resources for big enterprise deals.
The qualification framework we used worked brilliantly, and we learned that when we get too reliant on a single big deal in the pipeline, it can create a lot of risk.
Next Cycle Impact
We added an OKR for streamlining the legal process. We kept our deal size target the same, but we did change our qualification framework. And we added another key result about diversifying our pipeline.
This evaluation actually turned what could have been a total miss into some really valuable learning that improved our next quarter’s performance a whopping 40%
How Evaluation Gets You Ready For The Next Cycle’s OKRs
Every time you evaluate, it feeds into the next cycle. You take the insights you pull out and use them to set smarter goals from there.
You’ll figure out where your limits are. If you keep getting 0.3 on certain types of objectives over and over, that tells you something about how you’re stretched with your resources or skills. Get those sorted out before you set similar goals again.
You’ll spot patterns in the things that happen outside your control. If market conditions kept messing up three sets of your OKRs in a row, you need to work on setting some key results that are a bit more flexible.
You’ll get a better idea of what level of ambition works for you with an OKR Strategy for Evaluation. When teams first start with OKRs, they either set goals that are too easy or ones that are completely impossible. You can see where your sweet spot is by looking at historical data from your evaluations.
You’ll build up this rich history of knowledge. When you document your evaluations, they become a playbook for the future. New people coming in can look at what worked in the past and get a feel for what works in your place specifically.
Organizations that keep applying what they’ve learned from evaluation see goal-achievement rates go up by 56% within three cycles, according to the OKR Institute.
Common Evaluation Mistakes That’ll Kill Your Progress
Fudging scores for a good look
You know the inflating scores so you can look good. This completely kills the learning value. You need to create a safe space where people can be honest in their evaluations, not get penalized for it.
Turning evaluation into a blame-fest
You’re not looking for what went wrong so you can learn from it, but so you can go after an individual. That destroys collaboration and it’s not how you’re going to get anywhere.
Waiting too long
If you wait till six weeks after the end of the cycle to evaluate, you’re probably going to forget some stuff and miss some important details. Try to get round to it while it’s all still fresh.
Ignoring the context
A score of 0.4 is going to mean different things in a company that’s in the middle of a major shake-up compared to one that is stable. Always try to capture the context.
Not writing anything down
If you’re just talking about evaluation stuff but not actually documenting it, then those insights are just going to disappear. Write it all down.
OKR Strategy for Evaluation: Changing the Metrics Halfway Through the Cycle
Unless it’s absolutely necessary; just stick with what you said you’d use. Changing metrics afterwards makes evaluation pretty much meaningless and lets people just game the system.
Final Thoughts: Turning OKRs Into A Learning Machine
How you go about evaluating your OKRs really determines whether they are actually driving change or just a bit of corporate theatre.
The companies that are really achieving their goals aren’t just smarter, they’re also way more disciplined about taking the time to learn from every cycle.
Treating evaluation as your secret weapon is a good idea. While other companies are just setting goals and then forgetting them, you are going to be building a base of knowledge that gets better and better with each cycle through your OKR Strategy for Evaluation.
Start small if you need to. Even just having a 30-minute evaluation session is better than nothing. Get the habit going and then worry about refining the process.
Your next big breakthrough isn’t going to be in writing down better goals, it’s actually going to be in the evaluation you haven’t done yet.
FAQS
What’s the best way to figure out if your OKRs are on track?
Put a numerical score on them (0 to 1 scale) and then try to understand why things turned out the way they did. Get everyone involved, jot down what you learned and make sure you do that evaluation within a week after the cycle ends.
Should OKRs and performance reviews be intertwined?
No, connecting them tends to make people play it safe with their goals and doesn’t work out so well for ambition.
Keep them separate, but use the insights from OKRs to inform those performance discussions. They’re meant to help you stretch your goals a bit without risking your career.
What’s a good OKR score to be aiming for?
Try to aim for an average of about 0.7 to 0.8. If you’re consistently scoring below 0.5 there’s probably something wrong with how you set or executed those goals.
And honestly, it’s the context that matters more than the number itself.
How often should you be checking on your OKRs?
Take a look 3 times per cycle: once mid-cycle so you can course correct if you need to, once at the end of the cycle for a more formal evaluation, and then retrospective analysis to see what patterns emerge across multiple cycles.
If you’re working on quarterly OKRs, you should at least be doing those 3 check-ins.
Who should be responsible for making sure your OKRs are evaluated properly?
It’s the objective owner’s job to lead the evaluation but they should be working with all the contributors.
Leadership should provide some context but not take over the whole discussion, and ideally, HR or operations is there to help put everything together and make sure everyone’s doing it the same way.