Everything you need to know about Individual OKRs

Individual goals are goals that only one person is working on, and accountable for.

Individual goals are tricky, which is why they are turned off by default in Perdoo.

In this article, we'll tell you everything you need to know about individual goals.

What are individual goals?

Individual goals are goals that you really only need one person to focus on. That person is the lead and typically also the sole contributor.

The fact that only one person can be the lead for a goal, doesn't mean it's the only person working on that goal.

A Company Objective led by the CEO does not qualify as an individual goal. It's a Company Objective because you want a significant part of your organization to contribute to it.

A Team OKR for a one-person team is still a Team OKR — and not an individual OKR. If there were more people in the team, you'd want them to focus on that goal as well.

Individual goals can take the form of an individual KPI (like a sales target/quota) or an individual OKR (like a personal development Objective).

Benefits of working with individual goals

While it's best to avoid individual goals when new to strategy execution or OKR, they do offer certain advantages.

Here are a few advantages of working with individual goals.

Support personal development and career progression

Individual goals that focus on personal development or career progression are often called personal goals. An example would be "Learn to speak German fluently".

By setting and tracking personal goals, team members can focus on building specific skills, gaining new experiences, and demonstrating measurable progress in areas that matter to them.

This not only fosters continuous learning and self-improvement but also helps employees align their growth with the organization’s long-term strategy. Over time, achieving these goals builds confidence, increases visibility, and opens up opportunities for advancement, ensuring that career development is both intentional and rewarding.

Setting personal goals is also a great, low-risk way for employees to practice their goal-setting skills.

Sometimes, you want to keep personal goals private, here's how to do that.

Boost engagement, accountability, and ownership

Individuals can boost engagement, accountability, and ownership in a company by actively connecting their daily work to the organization’s purpose and goals, and by taking initiative beyond their core responsibilities.

When employees can see how their own contributions directly impact outcomes, they can feel more engaged and motivated to perform at their best.

Accountability grows when individuals set clear commitments for themselves, track their progress transparently, and communicate openly about challenges and successes.

What makes individual goals tricky?

Here are the most important reasons for being careful with individual goals.

They can erode trust

Individual goals can make your employees wonder why you are introducing OKR (or a broader strategy execution program). They might think you just want to add another level of control. Perdoo is designed to do the opposite: help you move from a work environment based on control, to a work environment based on trust.

They add complexity and administrative overhead

With Company and Team goals already in place, adding individual goals adds an extra level of complexity and increases the workload for creating, managing, and updating them. If you are a 100-people company and everyone owns on average 3 OKRs. That’s 300 OKRs per quarter and 1200 OKRs per year that need to be defined, tracked and updated!

For this reason, companies like Spotify and Delivery Hero decided to focus only on Company and Team OKRs.

In their blog post, Spotify explains why they moved away from individual OKRs:

“We noticed that we were putting energy into a process that wasn’t adding value. So we decided to ditch individual OKRs and focus on context and priorities instead. We make sure everyone knows exactly where we are going and what the current priorities are, and then we let the teams take responsibility for how to get there.”

They might make employees selfish

As mentioned before, individual OKRs can move the OKR program away from what the original aim of the framework. They tend to slip into the realms of individual performance management. As a consequence, you will experience more resistance when implementing OKR. You also risk your team losing focus on the ‘bigger picture,’ or the ‘why’ behind the work people chose to focus on.

Individual goals may result in employees focusing solely on their own goals, neglecting the bigger picture and the best interest of their team or company.

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For individual OKRs specifically, please also keep the following in mind:

Individual OKRs are often tasks

All too often, individual OKRs are so small in scope, that they rarely reflect important outcomes to achieve. They are more like tasks. These are better tracked as Initiatives: the projects and tasks that people work on to maintain a KPI or achieve an OKR.

The people working on Initiatives are the people that actually put in all the work to achieve a KPI or OKR. They are your most important asset.

Individual OKRs ignore Initiatives and Initiatives are key

When you get to the individual level, the focus should be on what needs to be done in order to achieve an OKR or KPI.

Everything you do (e.g. Build feature X) in order to achieve an Objective (e.g. Increase engagement) is what we call Initiatives in Perdoo. If you only have OKRs, then who is going to put in the actual work to achieve those OKRs? Just buying a scale, is not going to make you lose weight.

Initiatives allow individual team members to focus on the "doing" involved in moving the needle on Key Results (or KPIs), rather than using individual OKRs for this. It's much simpler and easier to manage. As one of our customers mentioned:

“We moved away from individual OKRs and focused just on company and team level. This has freed us to focus on Initiatives to support core objectives and pull teams together where individual OKRs encouraged this less.”

For OKRs, it's usually best to go from Team OKRs to Initiatives, instead of going from Team OKRs Individual OKRs.

How to work successfully with individual goals

When working with individual goals, please keep the following 3 things in mind.

Individual goals should not be tasks

Write individual goals in terms of measurable change (e.g., improving a metric, completing a milestone) rather than simply listing tasks. This helps you focus on impact and makes it easier to track progress and celebrate achievements.

Keep them meaningful but manageable

Choose individual goals that stretch employees and drive growth, but don’t overload them with too many. A handful of focused, high-impact goals will create more progress than a long list of scattered goals.

Not everyone needs to have individuals goals, all the time

It's okay for employees to not take part in your goal-setting program. Don't force each and every employee to have their own individual goals.

Individual goals in Perdoo

Perdoo does support individual goals. However, because they should be treated with care, we turn them off by default. Superadmins can easily enable Individuals Goals in Configure > Features.

To learn more about Individual Goals in Perdoo, visit our Support Center.