In this data driven age, all aspects of a company’s performance are measured, tallied, and reported upon. Businesses no longer operate on hunches. Human Resources functions are no different, which is why OKRs exist (objectives and key results) as a vital indicator of staff progress. OKRs are collaboratively agreed upon measures of staff engagement and continuing professional development.
When you want to track the productivity of your employees benignly using OKRs, there are plenty of free online tools you can draw upon. Most offer paid-for upgrades, but their basic trial versions and free tiers will give you a good idea of what they are offering and whether it will work for your business.
Here we run down ten of the best OKR tools you can incorporate within your HR processes.
1:Profit.co – Best for Company’s of All Size
If OKRs are at the core of your management approach, Profit.co may be the OKR tool for you. Profit.co is big on alignment at all levels of an organization. Its dashboards break this down by department, team and individual, with a simple visual tree that shows how each person contributes to a strategic goal.
Its approach is a little corporate and its high level of transparency might not suit every start-up. However, Profit.co is excellent at guiding you through the creation of OKRs and the alignment of these with strategic goals and KPIs. The free version is a little light on features but will give you a good feel for how it works.
2: Asana – Best for Project Management
Asana is a major player in the OKR world, used by over a thousand major companies including Uber, Airbnb and Pinterest. It’s much more than an OKR tool; it’s really a full project management suite. Asana’s free version is remarkably generous, offering everything from unlimited tasks, projects, and messages to over 100 free integrations.
Goal tracking is easy with green, amber, and red progress indicators, Gantt charts and the ability to track individual’s workload, meaning that eager beaver’s task-list won’t become unmanageable. However, it does have a limit of fifteen team members, so you’ll want to upgrade if you love Asana and you have a larger team to manage.
3: Confluence – Best for Remote Working
From the makers of Trello, comes this shared virtual OKR workspace for remote-working teams. OKR can be a challenge when you rarely meet face to face, but systems like confluence stress accountability and shared responsibility within the 21st century “workplace”.
Different sections of confluence are devoted to “pages” (an individual’s OKRs) and “spaces” (team goals and specific projects) meaning managers can switch between overviews and one-to-one oversight. There are many useful templates, meaning you don’t have to set up everything from scratch, and integration with the Jira project management platform, also from Atlassian. A word of warning – the free version allows up to ten team members only.
4: Inspire – Best for Learning and Development
Inspire may not have a free tier, but they do offer a complementary demo trial, which is worth looking into. Their OKR and goal-setting system is sophisticated and offers managers a chance to gain real insight into their employee’s engagement, beyond mere metrics.
Individual employees set up their own customizable homepages, then integrate these within their teams. OKRs can be tracked two ways – with traditional metrics or as “smart goals” (based on motivation, attainability, and relevance). Inspire is big on learning content and continuous conversation and would suit teams who work well with regular feedback. Managers in particular can use Inspire to track CPD and motivation within their teams.
5: Weekdone – Best for Beginners in OKR
As its name might suggest, Weekdone centers on regular company check-ins and puts OKRs front and center. Coaching and support are a big part of Weekdone’s offering, with team training and live webinars. The makers say they are “dedicated to creating a results-orientated culture in your business” and Weekdone might be particularly effective within new start-ups.
Weekdone is better thought of as an OKR consultancy with a supportive platform and dashboards. When you enlist their aid, be prepared for regular reviews with an expert OKR coach, team training and quarterly reviews. Weekdone is free for up to three users, and a free 14-day trial is available for four or more employees.
6: Perdoo – Best for Clarity and Simplicity
Focusing on communicating and aligning corporate strategy, Perdoo is based on the “roadmap” concept for goal achievement. They support managers in writing OKRs and offer a free eBook to help you do this effectively and collaboratively.
Perdoo boasts one of the most straightforward and graphically clear dashboards we’ve seen, with drag and drop functionality for organizing and prioritizing tasks. Uniquely, as well as human coaches, Perdoo integrates an “ambassador bot” which can be set to provide automatic progress updates across your teams. Perdoo’s free offering allows for up to ten team members.
7: Heartpace – Good for Traditional HR with a Twist
Not a heart health app, Heartpace is very much about personal goal setting within the context of an organization. It is one of the few modern OKR apps retaining traditional concepts like “performance appraisals” and “360-degree feedback” on the basis that, if it’s not broken, why reinvent it?
Heartpace is great for managers who are budget holders within their department, since it has a financial slant that sets it apart from other OKR rivals. With tools for one-to-one surveys and appraisals, plus a SMART salary review system for managers, Heartpace might suit a traditional workplace wanting to adopt a digital OKR solution for the first time.
8: Wrike – Best for Comprehensiveness and Value
Used by over 20,000 companies, Wrike is a project planning monster which integrates individual and team goals and OKRs into task and project management. Its clients are legendary – Siemens, Google, Dell, Ogilvy, Estee Lauder, Walmart and many more. Despite its scale, Wrike’s free version offers centralized project management for unlimited users, making this well worth investigating.
Wrike’s Project Portfolio Overview dashboards give managers instant and clear visual insights into how teams are performing against their OKRs. It’s Agile Teamwork template is the one to adopt for an OKR-driven approach, displaying tasks by assignee together with performance metrics. It’s provides a lot more than OKR, however, so Wrike’s potential may take some time to master.
9: CultureAmp – Best for Wellbeing and Retention
CultureAmp is about four things – engagement, performance, development, and retention. It is a very people-driven app, with a focus on employee wellbeing that’s stronger than many other OKR platforms. Despite its touchy-feely vibe, CultureAmp reports a 25% average growth in profitability for its users. This may be due to the way it helps HR teams build cohesive, committed teams with a shared sense of goal ownership.
They do have impressive clients too, including Etsy, McDonalds and Oracle, so CultureAmp is also a corporate contender. Goal tracking is straightforward and clear, and reviews are very much development-focused (key to retention). This helps build a culture which values its employees individual contributions as well as how well these integrate with team and company goals.
Conclusion
That’s our rundown of the best current OKR platforms and apps with either free trial versions or free tiers available. They all offer HR managers the opportunity to work more efficiently with greater insight and oversight into their employee’s performance. OKR needn’t be onerous, when you integrate a platform that makes it systematic and central to success.
