When we collaborate across teams on projects there are many pitfalls and challenges that can result in failure. A study for the Harvard Business Review found that 75% of cross functional teams are dysfunctional. Problems can arise as a result of poor communication around specifications of a project and around the alignment of the company's corporate goals.

When we set objectives, we need to know what will define a successful outcome. It's obvious to us that an objective such as "increase sales" is meaningless without knowing how much we need to increase sales by in order to be able to say that we achieved the objective. This is why we associate a set of key results with each objective. Key results let us state the desired outcome in a quantitive way, e.g. "Increase sales of product A by $40k per month". Whilst it is sufficient to define the progress towards each key result as simply a confidence level of achieving the desired outcome, it is sometimes more convenient and more meaningful to state the exact quantitive value of whatever metric we are measuring.

Workteam OKR enables employees to align their goals with organizational objectives. Typically, organizations follow a quarterly rhythm of goal setting, where goals are published every 3 months and employees create a new set of goals to align with these goals, to the same rhythm.

Companies devote endless time communicating strategy to their employees—but only a minority take it in, according to research by the University of Technology in Sydney. The researchers identified 20 companies with clearly articulated strategies and asked their employees to select their employer's strategy from six possible options. Just 29% of employees answered correctly.