How to increase adoption of Tability

Three steps to getting your team invested in your OKR process

OKRs work best when they’re top of mind for your team. Tability can help ensure that your team is reminded to update their key results and presents data to you in an easy to consume format. But before you can craft the perfect dashboard, send an automated report to your stakeholders, or leverage AI to quickly jump to what’s most important, you need to get your team engaged and committed.

Here, we’ll walk through three simple steps to show your team that you’re committed to your OKR process and encourage thoughtful updates along the way.

Step 1. Consider what, and how, you communicate

Whether your team is new to OKRs in general or just new to Tability, you’ll need to make it clear why you’re having them adopt a new tool and/or process. You’ve kicked the tires, looked at the guides, gotten a demo, and considered your needs and workflow, but your team is coming in without that context. There are four things you’ll need to communicate to them:

• (If applicable) What are OKRs and how will they benefit the team?

• Why did you choose Tability over what you were doing previously?

• What are the expectations you have for how they’ll use Tability?

• How will you keep everyone accountable?

What are OKRs?

If your team is new to OKRs in general, you’ll want to first introduce the concept. OKRs at an organizational level are easy to understand– we need to keep the business moving in a certain direction and have to measure our progress. But as you get down to the department and team levels, it can feel like another ask or a way to micromanage work instead of a tool for alignment.

As you introduce OKRs to your team, you’ll want to highlight the benefits that will be felt at the team level, not just the benefits to the organization or to leadership. Need some help putting it into words? Check out this example:

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) help us focus on what matters most by not only clearly defining our goals and how we’ll measure success, but by also focusing on the outcomes, not just the day-to-day work being done. We’ll be able to look at a smaller number of priorities and give ownership to our teams to figure out how to attain them. By using OKRs, we can stay focused, track progress more effectively, and better align our efforts by seeing what other teams are working towards.

By letting your team know that this is going to be more focused on allowing them to set their priorities and have a direct impact, it makes moving to the OKR framework easier.

Need more details on running an effective OKR process? Check out our guide here.

Why did you choose Tability?

Introducing a new tool should always elicit a “Why?” from your team. After all, they use countless other tools, so why should they add another to the stack? In other words, what is the job that you’re hiring Tability to do? And is that job the same for you as it is for the rest of the team?

We built Tability to be incredibly user friendly and allow teams to benefit as much from engaging as leaders do. But introducing the idea first helps handle any objections that might come up before your team has a chance to get eyes on Tability.

Once you’ve decided to move forward with Tability, consider an email like this template:

Subject: Introducing our team to Tability Hi team, I wanted to take a moment to introduce you to a tool we’ll be using called Tability. Tability is designed to help teams set, track, and achieve goals more effectively using the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework. It provides a simple way to align our priorities, measure progress, and stay focused on what matters most. With Tability, you’ll be able to:

• Clearly define your goals and key results

• Track progress through regular check-ins

• Get visibility into what everyone is working on

• Stay aligned across the team without unnecessary meetings

Over the coming days, we’ll begin onboarding and sharing more details on how we’ll use it in our workflows. If you have any questions or run into any issues, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Looking forward to seeing how this helps us stay more aligned and effective as a team.

Best, [Your Name]

What are your expectations?

Defining your OKR process (especially your update process) is key. We recommend putting together an OKR playbook for your organization with details about who are the main drivers of your OKR process, how to write OKRs, and what the expectations are around updates. You can find more details about an OKR playbook here.

Generally, we recommend telling your team that you expect them to:

• Update OKRs weekly (for quarterly OKRs). This should take around 15 minutes per week.

• Read their teammates’ check-ins.

• Talk about their OKRs in a team meeting (weekly is best, but bi-weekly is fine)

These are not overly burdensome expectations to set, but you do want to be explicit in the fact that these are expectations. Let your team know that Tability will automatically track whether check-ins have been completed and whether they’ve been read as well– not as a way to instill fear or punish those who haven’t completed them, but as a way to ensure that the team is holding themselves and each other accountable to communicating their progress.

How will you keep your team accountable?

Speaking of– Tability includes pre-built dashboards and customizable filters to let you see who has and has not completed their updates. For the pre-built dashboard, navigate to Dashboards>People and look at the section of People with overdue check-ins

For a customizable filter, head to Filters>Filter + > Insights>Pending check-ins (or overdue check-ins). Feel free to add additional filters around key result owners, teams, or anything else:

Setting this dashboard up should be public knowledge– your team should understand that you’re serious about updates and want to be able to find who hasn’t done them yet.

That said, in the prebuilt dashboard, we’ll show you who has done the most check-ins in a row. This is perfect for celebrating your team members who are meeting your expectations. A simple message like “Congratulations to [name] for having not missed their check-ins for X consecutive weeks! We appreciate your commitment to keeping our goals on track” can encourage others to remember to get their check-ins in.

Step 2: Cut out the guess work

Limiting the amount of decisions your team needs to make can help make any additional task easier for them. Consider the check-in: Your team updates their metric, then chooses a confidence, and then writes a comment to give you data around how the key result is performing. All things that should be fairly simple, right?

But when teams don’t have clear expectations set or are trying to figure out what leaders want instead of just giving data, it can lead to overcomplication and feelings of anxiety. They have to go find the data, then they need to analyze it enough to set expectations about the future. They worry that marking something as red reflects poorly on them, so they try to find a way to make things look better than they are. Then they panic when it’s time to write an update since they don’t want to give away the fact they’re inflating their confidence, so they write just “Metric changed from X to Y” and hit submit.

It’s human, but how do we fix it?

Celebrate low confidence

It seems counterintuitive, but highlighting the first user to mark a goal red can do a ton for encouraging honesty from your team on the state of your OKRs. If a team member says they need help, and you can get them the help or resources they need, they’ll be far more likely to call out issues early in the future. If a team member doesn’t ask for help, and then the goal is too far gone to be saved, you’ve wasted weeks thinking things were going better than they were.

A simple message like “Thanks to [name] for flagging the issues with [key result]. We were able to get [resources granted], and now it looks like we’ll be able to get back on track!” is perfect to highlight why the process is important.

In the product, we can also limit the ability to repeatedly mark a goal as yellow to prevent team members from hiding their key results that should be red. In a plan, go to the three dots in the upper right corner>plan settings and at the bottom, enable the At risk limit to set a maximum number of times that a user can mark a goal as yellow in a row:

This forces team members to consider if they’re being overly cautious or overly optimistic, and makes sure you don’t end up with a full quarter of yellow goals only to end the quarter with a sea of red.

Outline your team’s check-ins

A blank form field can be intimidating, to say nothing of leaving you with a mix of good and bad updates. Where one team member will give you a detailed rundown of everything they’re doing to accomplish a goal, another might simply say “it’s good” and move on.

Some organizations use a specific model for goal updates that ensures consistency and a good amount of information:

• What?

• So what?

• Now what?

Brief and to the point, this format asks teams to talk about what has happened, why it matters, and what they’re going to do about it. It can be simple:

We rolled out the new AI qualification bot last week. It has already improved conversions by 20%, with all of the new conversions coming from the bot. We plan on decreasing the time on page rules to see if we can capture more leads.

This update has a clear structure and makes it so that anyone reading the update understands where this key result is headed.

In Tability, you can set up a custom prompt for all of your check-ins to remind your team of what you want to see in their check-ins. Admins and workspace owners can go to the admin settings>customise>custom checkin prompt. Here, you can add whatever information or text you’d like to. This will show up in the check-in field when your team updates their key results:

Some suggested prompts:

• Summary/Wins/Misses

• What we did this week/What we’ll do next week/Blockers

• What I did/Who I worked with/Who else needs to know

• Why did the metric move/what will make the metric move/what if the metric doesn’t move

Step 3: Make your progress visible

Once expectations are clear and your team knows how to update their OKRs, the next step is making sure those updates don’t disappear into a dashboard that no one looks at. OKRs only drive alignment when they’re actively discussed and visible to everyone.

Bring OKRs into your regular team rhythm. This can be as simple as reviewing key results in your weekly meeting, calling out progress (or lack of it), and asking a few quick questions: What’s moving? What’s stuck? Where do we need help? When OKRs are consistently part of the conversation, they stay top of mind and feel relevant to day-to-day work.

Equally important is sharing progress publicly. When updates are visible across the team, it creates accountability and encourages collaboration. Team members can see where others are making progress, where goals are at risk, and where they might be able to contribute. It also reinforces that OKRs aren’t just for managers—they’re a shared tool for alignment.

Share top-level OKRs during all-hands (or in company wide emails)

Leaders set the tone for OKRs. And it’s important to show that any process you’re asking your team to engage in isn’t something that leaders wouldn’t do themselves. So any time you can talk to the whole organization about the organization’s OKRs, you should do so. Company all-hands should have a slide highlighting the progress your team is making. If you don’t have all-hands meetings, you can share progress via email.

Tability makes this easy with the option to use Presentation mode to create a shareable report. Prefer slides? Export your OKRs to Powerpoint or Google Slides:

Use this visibility to celebrate wins and highlight transparency. Call out strong progress, recognize consistent updates, and just as importantly, acknowledge when someone flags a risk early. This helps build a culture where honest reporting is valued over “looking good.”

Adoption of Tability comes down to a few basics: clear expectations, simple updates, and making sure progress stays visible.

Make sure your team understands why you’re using OKRs, what you expect from them, and how often they should be updating. Keep the update process straightforward, and bring OKRs into your regular team conversations so they don’t get ignored.

If engagement drops off, it’s usually a sign that something in those areas isn’t clear or consistent—so that’s the first place to look.