It might not be possible in your situation, but I wonder if there's some way to make broader categories that you can roll a few individual OKRs into. If nothing

It might not be possible in your situation, but I wonder if there's some way to make broader categories that you can roll a few individual OKRs into. If nothing else, it would help you in reporting up: these are our three broad important objectives as a research group, and this is how we're tracking on them. Your subordinates would keep their granular OKRs, and you could think in terms of how they serve your general goals. Also, we do use numbers on OKRs (at well-known modern tech giant). We do try to normalize to a real number [0,1] indicating roughly the probability of successfully meeting the goal by the end of quarter. EDIT: to clarify, we do track something quantitative for each KR: error rate, response time, customer satisfaction score, whatever. Then we normalize to a probability so that we can scan the columns quickly and compare like with like.