How does Expertime use OKRs to support team performance?

Expertime is an IT consultancy company that helps its clients to transform their digital environment to better meet their business, social, environmental and professional challenges. With a mission closely linked to business support, the HR department decided to use Zest, notably the OKR (Objectives Key Results) feature, to put employees back at the heart of the company’s success, to have an impact and to boost its performance.

Using OKRs to structure the company’s strategy and direction

Operating in the digital sector where speed and responsiveness are a prerequisite, Expertime called on Zest and its digital suite to help them structure their strategy and quickly implement it at all organisational levels. The use of the OKR method was a natural choice because it makes it easy to create and share a common vision, demonstrating the alignment of objectives and projects as they evolve over time. Indeed, the principle is simple: create an objective and associate it with 3 to 5 key results. One of the strengths of Zest is that it allows you to create these cascading OKRs, in a centralised or decentralised manner, providing a global vision of the alignment of objectives and their progress.

At Expertime, the method was implemented in two steps: after a clear definition of the strategy and the direction to be followed (formalised in a corporate OKR within the Board of Directors) the HR department devotes a great deal of effort to communication and training in order to get the entire company on board.

Concretely, an initial training session on the method was given to all managers, followed by additional 1 to 1 meetings with those who were reluctant to take part in the project at first in order to help them understand its benefits and those who were identified as potential internal ambassadors for the project.

At the end of this first phase, the OKRs were deployed by each manager: first at the level of the business units, then at the level of the various departments and finally at the individual level. This phased approach (accessible from the alignment map) has the advantage of guaranteeing a real alignment of all OKRs and ensuring coherence between the actions and projects implemented.

Involve local managers and provide meaning to individual roles

Particular attention was paid to supporting local managers to ensure that they understood the method and that it was applied correctly in practice.

This ensured the successful launch of the project and enhanced the value of each employee’s contribution to the company. At the same time, the employee is truly placed at the centre of the system and his or her role is enhanced.

This is the philosophy of Zest, which aims to put the employee back at the centre through its listening tool, but also through so-called agile management practices that advocate continuous feedback, accountability and collaborative mode. The goal is to have employees who are committed, engaged and therefore perform well.