Use OKRs for performance reviews without confusion. Learn where OKRs fit, what to avoid, and a simple process with scripts, examples, and checklists.
Marketing Lead
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February 18, 2026
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10 Mins read
It’s performance review season and a team lead is pinging you about “OKR scoring,” and someone asking whether missing a Key Result means “no bonus.”
Your spreadsheet has three tabs: goals, ratings, and a fourth tab called “updated final.”
This is exactly where OKRs for performance reviews go wrong.
OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are a goal system for focus and alignment. They are supposed to make priorities visible and measurable across a team and company. Google popularized them, but the core idea is now everywhere.
Performance reviews are an evaluation and decision process: scope, skill, behaviors, output quality, role level, and sometimes pay and promotion.
CFRs (Conversations, Feedback, Recognition) are the weekly or biweekly behaviors that stop performance reviews from becoming a surprise.
Here’s the clean split that saves you:
If you take only one idea from this article, take this:
Do not treat an OKR score as a performance score.
That’s not a motivational poster. It is a risk-control mechanism.
When you connect OKR completion directly to compensation or ratings, people start aiming low (sandbagging), hiding risk, and optimizing for optics.
A few predictable failures show up fast:
That last one matters in ops-heavy environments (logistics, field sales, contact centers, retail). If incentives sit on the wrong metric, you can create real downstream costs.
The opposite extreme is also common: HR launches OKRs, then review season pretends they don’t exist.
That creates a different set of problems:
The practical fix is not “make OKRs the rating.”
The fix is: use OKRs as evidence of contribution and judgment quality, not as a score.
If you manage teams in African markets, a few constraints show up repeatedly:
The process below is designed to survive these constraints without becoming theater.
Ryan Panchadsaram makes a blunt point in a What Matters interview: performance reviews should focus on skills, responsibilities, and output quality, independent of OKRs.
If you use OKR percentage as the rating, you will reward low ambition and punish risk-taking. People notice. They adjust.
Bad KR: “Run 6 trainings.”
Better KR: “Reduce onboarding time-to-productivity from 6 weeks to 4 weeks, measured by first-week QA pass rate and supervisor sign-off.”
Tasks are inputs. KRs should be observable evidence that the objective is being achieved.
Most teams do better with 1–3 Objectives per quarter, with 2–4 Key Results each. Anything more becomes a dashboard graveyard.
OKRs are designed for alignment. If every person has isolated OKRs, you get local optimization and conflict.
Keep team OKRs as the primary unit, then let individuals carry supporting deliverables or sub-KRs.
Review season is a terrible time to introduce performance feedback for the first time.
Weekly or biweekly CFR-style check-ins keep the review lightweight.
In many teams, the real review problem is not goal-setting. It is missing evidence.
When your only “record” is memory, the loudest story wins.
You need a minimal evidence pack. Not an essay.
Before you touch OKRs, define the decision type:
This matters because OKRs are better at describing what the team tried to move than whether someone performed at level.
Cadence A: OKR check-ins
Cadence B: Performance review decisions
McKinsey & Company highlights the importance of frequent performance conversations rather than saving everything for a single annual moment.
Constraint acknowledgment: if you only have time for one thing, do monthly check-ins. Put it on the calendar now, not “when things calm down.”
A practical OKR test I use:
Also, watch the “data reality” problem.
If you cannot measure something cleanly, you can still use a KR, but define the proxy and the collection method upfront.
Example: if you cannot measure churn perfectly, use “renewal conversion rate from finance invoices” as a proxy.
This is the bridge between OKRs and reviews.
Your evidence pack should be one page per person, with:
Constraint acknowledgment: if documentation is weak in your culture, start by requiring just links and screenshots. Writing can come later.
In check-ins, ask:
Google’s re:Work guidance explicitly frames OKRs as a learning tool, not an evaluation instrument.
Also, normalize partial achievement. re:Work notes that in some OKR systems, 60–70% achievement can be a sign the goals were appropriately ambitious.
This is where most companies need a script and a rubric.
In the review conversation, treat OKRs like a map of what mattered, then evaluate performance through a separate lens:
OKR outcomes can support these points, but they should not replace them.
A clean sentence that helps:
“Your OKRs show what the team was trying to move. Your performance review is about how you performed in the full scope of your role while doing that work.”
Calibration is boring, but it prevents bias.
If you run reviews without calibration, you often get:
ZS Associates notes that tying OKRs to pay can drive sandbagging and slow transformation, which is one reason many organizations disconnect OKRs from bonuses.
When communicating decisions:
If your biggest problem is that OKRs, check-ins, and reviews live in disconnected spreadsheets, a tool helps mostly with consistency and evidence.
Teams often use:
That’s the practical win: fewer “final final” documents, more clean inputs.
“Quick reset on how we’re using OKRs for performance reviews.
Our OKRs are the team’s commitments and learning tool. They show what we aimed to move and what we learned along the way.
Your performance review is about how you performed in the full scope of your role: execution quality, skills, judgment, and collaboration.
So we will talk about OKRs in reviews as context and evidence, but we are not turning KR percentages into a rating.”
Constraint acknowledgment line you can add:
“If the data is messy this week, bring the best proxy you have. Screenshot, export, customer notes, whatever is real.”
“I want to start with outcomes and scope.
Here are the two outcomes you contributed to most, and the artifacts that show it.
Now I want to talk about how you operated: reliability, quality, how you handled trade-offs, and how you worked with others.
Your OKRs are part of the story, but the review is about your role performance overall.”
“You missed two Key Results, and we should learn from why.
At the same time, the way you handled the work shows strong role performance: you owned the risk, escalated early, kept quality high, and supported other teams.
So the OKR miss is a learning signal, not a punishment signal.”
This aligns with the “stretch goal” logic and avoids penalizing ambition.
Objective: Improve on-time delivery in Lagos and Abuja without raising cost per delivery.
Key Results:
Review season use:
If KR1 lands at 84% (not 88%), you do not auto-rate the lead down.
You ask: what changed, what decisions did they make, and did they operate at level?
Objective: Improve resolution quality while reducing repeat contacts.
Key Results:
Review season use:
The SOP output is evidence, but the performance review still evaluates coaching behavior, escalation handling, and leadership.
Sales is where people get nervous because comp is already tied to outcomes.
A practical approach is: keep commissions tied to revenue, but use OKRs for team-level improvement and “organizational citizenship” behaviors that protect the business long-term, similar to examples discussed in What Matters content.
Most OKR practitioners advise keeping salary decisions separate because tying them directly can create sandbagging and cultural issues.
If you must include goal signals in comp, do it indirectly: evaluate role performance, skills, and output quality, and treat OKRs as contextual evidence.
Yes, scoring helps learning, forecasting, and focus. Just keep the score out of pay formulas.
Also, in some systems, 60–70% achievement can reflect appropriate ambition.
Separate two diagnoses:
Your CFR notes and evidence pack should make the diagnosis obvious.
They can, but anchor them to team OKRs so you do not create silo goals.
A practical pattern:
In practice: 1–3 Objectives per quarter, 2–4 KRs per Objective.
If you have more, you probably have a priority problem.
Name the proxy and collection method inside the KR.
Examples:
Constraint acknowledgment: imperfect measurement is fine. Hidden measurement is not.
Treat OKRs as a living plan. Update them with documented reasons.
That is better than pretending the original plan was still possible.
No. Competencies capture how someone works and what skills they demonstrate.
If you want to reduce confusion, tie performance reviews to a competency framework, and use OKRs to capture the “what we tried to move” for the period.
In the next 7 days, do one thing:
Create a one-page evidence pack template and require it for every review.
That single artifact forces clarity: what mattered, what moved, what proof exists, what skills showed up.
If you want to make it even easier, put OKRs, evidence packs, and reviews in one system (for example, Talstack Goals + Performance Reviews + Analytics) so managers stop rebuilding the same process in new spreadsheets each quarter.
