How Vertiv Partnered with Betterworks to Create eleVate

Ingrid Cullen:
Hello everyone. Thanks for joining today. I’m Ingrid Cullen. I’m here with Andrew Cole, and we are going to be having a discussion about organizational transformation and building the backbone for that transformation. So just as a quick introduction, Andrew Cole here joined Vertiv in January of 2017. He’s their Chief Organizational Development and Human Resources Officer. He sets the company’s strategic direction for change management and talent acquisition and has over two decades of experience with strategic transformations around the globe with teams of up to 20,000 employees.

Myself, my name’s Ingrid Cullen. I’m a customer success manager here at Betterworks. I’ve worked closely supporting the team at Vertiv since Andrew joined in early 2017, and I’ve seen the organization go through a really incredible transformation, and I’m excited to share this story with all of you today.

As a bit of housekeeping, I’ll be asking Andrew about his experience, but we encourage audience members to ask questions as well. So feel free to post in chat. We’ll monitor the chat as we go, and also leave some time for Q&A at the end. Alright, so Andrew, to start off, I want to ask about the landscape at Vertiv. When you joined, the company needed to make a significant transformation to become more customer-centric. And what role did HR play in enabling this transformation?

Andrew Cole:
Yeah, thank you, Ingrid, and thank you for the introduction. So I always remember two weeks after I joined the organization, a consulting company that had been hired came up to me and presented me the results of a survey that had been done across the employees in Vertiv prior to the acquisition. And it was astonishing. The results indicated that in 24 out of the 26 areas, we were scoring in the lower quintile. And so that was the starting point. When I think back to the culture, it was very much a fear-based culture that had been established in the organization. There were about 20 different companies that were spread across the world, over 70 plus legal entities.

And there had been a significant shift in the market in which we were operating. And as a result of it, we had to come in as HR professionals and take a look and say, “Alright, where do we begin here?” And we started with the values of the organization and established an understanding as to what were the values that we were going to operate the organization off of. And one of those was respect, which is the foundation of all things that we do across Vertiv. And then also transparency, because two areas that we were failing in, mainly as far as the employees were concerned, was the strategy and what role did their job play in executing or carrying out that strategy. And they simply did not know the answer.

Ingrid Cullen:
That really resonates. Not really having a clear sense of strategy can create a lot of problems, and you chose to focus on goal setting and also the relationship between the manager and their team member. And why did you choose to focus in those areas?

Andrew Cole:
Yeah, so Vertiv was very much an engineering organization. So as we stood at the bench as an engineering company, we believed that we knew what it was the customer wanted. Therefore a build it and they’ll buy it kind of mentality. And it was very clear that the customers were getting far better informed and they had ideas themselves as to what they wanted. And so we had to become a customer-centric organization. In order to do that, you’ve got to listen. And it’s very easy to actually say it, but when you’ve grown up inside of an organization and the culture tells you we know best and we’ve got a good brand in the marketplace, then there tends to be this element of almost being dismissive of the customer. Well, in order for the front-facing end of the organization to be paying attention to the customer, we knew that inside of the culture of the company, we had to be demonstrating that same listening skill and capability. And that was a big part of the shift in order for us to become more customer-centric in how we were approaching the marketplace.

Ingrid Cullen:
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And when you were making this change, I remember we chose to start first on the HR and IT organizations and then roll out to the rest of the business. Why did you choose those organizations, and how did that help with the change?

Andrew Cole:
Yeah, so we decided that we were going to launch this as a pilot, and we chose HR and IT because the two organizations or departments within the company globally that were going to touch this implementation were going to be HR and IT. And in the conversations that I was having with the leadership team, I really wanted the professionals within HR and IT to not only understand the tool, because the tool is only a part of it. It’s the change management, it’s everything else around it that really makes the impact on the organization.

And what we did was that we implemented it with those two around the world first, and in doing so we discovered all kinds of things in our after-action reviews that we were able to correct and then put into the plan for a global launch. That pilot, by the way, lasted for almost a full year. And then after that, we did our after-action review. Then when we launched, we launched globally across the entire company with the learnings that we had picked up from the pilot that had been done the year before.

Ingrid Cullen:
Yeah, and one of the things I remember about that pilot that I think was really smart to include was the fact that it was two global organizations. So we had input from all the different regions and different levels within each of those organizations. What were some of the pushback or challenges that you remember coming up in the pilot, and how did we re-correct?

Andrew Cole:
Well, it went from everything from, “Oh, another tool that we have to yet implement,” to, “Why do I need to figure out a different way to write my OKRs? The way I’ve been doing it for years has worked just fine,” to, “Why do I need to sit down quarterly with my employees? I’ve been sitting down once a year and I can barely get to that. Now you’re asking me to sit down quarterly. Have you lost your mind?” You name it. There was a laundry list of excuses and reasons as to why we should not move forward with implementing it.

But I still go back that the conversation was never going to be about HR forcing this on the business, the mentality always, with the CEO, and by the way, the CEO had to buy in at the very outset, because if the CEO doesn’t buy in, you might as well just forget it. Fold up your tent and go home because it’s not going to work. But if you look at it from the standpoint of how we implemented the OKRs and the buy-in to the quarterly conversations was all about the CEO doing it with his executives and then the executive team doing it with their direct reports. And once they started to see the value happening, then they got completely bought into the fact that this was the right direction to go in.

Ingrid Cullen:
Yeah, absolutely. One other thing, as I was thinking about the success of the pilot and then moving to the broader rollout, communication was so key. And I remember you saying, “If you’re not sick of hearing me say it, I haven’t said it enough,” or something along those lines. And I think that’s so true, and I’d love to hear about how you’ve approached communication at Vertiv, what worked well, maybe what didn’t work, and what organizations can do.

Andrew Cole:
So we are now an organization that firmly believes that anytime you introduce something new into the company, employees have to hear it seven different times before they begin to realize that you’re serious about it and before it begins to actually settle into the way in which they think. And so when we started out, we knew that at least the first four to five times was going to be noise. It was going to be one other thing that’s going to be in a communication that they just let go. And so we worked out different strategies about how do we communicate? So we would do it in an email, which is really at the lowest of the low level of it being effectiveness, but then we had the CEO talk about it at one of these quarterly communications. I ended up speaking directly at a global town hall meeting.

We had then every single executive would bring it up in their conversations with their direct reports and ended up requiring that there be focus group discussions around why would this benefit? What would be some of the drawbacks? So that it was now more dialogue. Bottom line was that it started to appear everywhere in the organization that this was the direction we were heading in. One last comment that we built into the communication all along, this was going to be about the way in which Vertiv was going to do business going forward. In order for us to close the gap, and we were very transparent on how dismal our scores were, and I would talk about them all the time. And I would say that the only way that we are going to do this, and so with the leaders, is by making sure that we have a process and a system by which we communicate the strategy the entire way down to the actionable items that every employee in the company has got to execute.

Ingrid Cullen:
Yeah, that’s really true. Something that I would add that I think you guys did really well is create your own branding around this program. And so right from the beginning, the Vertiv team came up with this concept, this brand called “eleVate” that was all about elevating your talent, elevating your performance, and it was tied into a lot of other initiatives that Vertiv was doing around making these more customer-centric business changes. And what we saw is that that really shifted the conversation from being, “Oh, we have to do OKRs with Betterworks. We have to do this new tool. It’s another thing I have to sign into,” to being, “This is our eleVate program. Oh, by the way, you happen to use Betterworks,” but it’s really not about the technology, it’s about the process and something that’s really authentic to Vertiv’s message and feels really relevant to people because it relates to things other than just this one initiative.

Andrew Cole:
Absolutely right. And the eleVate program inside the company, by the way, is depicted in a wheel, and it starts from the moment that an employee comes into the organization, and goes the entire way around to the exit interview. And throughout all of that, it’s about the development, about the enhancement, about the encouragement, about the respect of the employee and their entire engagement in the organization.

Ingrid Cullen:
Great. We had a question in the chat about… a question for me about the customer success manager’s role with Vertiv’s change. And so I can provide a little context on how we approach customer success here at Betterworks, and we really see ourselves as partners to our organizations when they’re making these changes. As Andrew has touched on, if you’re looking to roll out OKRs, if you’re looking to take a new approach to performance management, the technology is only one piece of the puzzle. So my role and my team’s role is to really guide our customers through what are the decisions that you have to make? How do you actually change behavior, and how does the technology support that change? So that’s kind of how I fit in. Andrew, is there anything you would add to that?

Andrew Cole:
Yeah, so within Vertiv, one of the things that we did was that we stopped and went back to define the problem that we’re trying to solve. And once we got there, then we were able to get to the strategy. And then once we got the strategy defined, now we were able to get into the conversation around OKRs. But fundamentally, if you do not bring the organization along the journey and the executives spend hours locked away in a conference room and they make the journey and then they come out and they expect to just drop it into the employee base and they’re going to embrace it, it’s just not the way it works. The employees have to be fully engaged in the journey to an understanding of why are we doing the OKRs, and how is it actually going to elevate the talent across the organization?

Ingrid Cullen:
Yeah, that’s a really good point. We have another question about how do you convince leaders to shift their mindset from viewing OKRs as just being linked to compensation, rewards, reviews?

Andrew Cole:
Yeah, so there are two things I would say here. First of all, I say to managers of people within Vertiv all the time, the first requirement to be a manager inside the company is that you actually have to care about your people. And I know that may be a novel statement, a novel idea, but it’s just really important that whoever you have in a manager role genuinely cares about the folks that they have under their responsibility. And when you have that, then everything that you approach from there on in is about the individual. How do you improve their performance? How do you improve their understanding of the strategy? How do you stretch them to become more than what they are today? And so I would say that that was core to actions that we were taking. 

I would also say that when you look across the utilization of the tool, when the CEO and the executive team actually started to have the conversations every day, every week around OKRs, and they were using the language, and then they were using the system, it made a huge difference to the adoption rate across the organization.

Ingrid Cullen:
Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. And a segue I wanted to touch on, we focused on the OKR side of your program, but something else that I think you’ve put a lot of focus on is the conversations and feedback and the quarterly review process and really from the beginning overhauled what Vertiv was doing for performance management. And so could you touch on what was the old way of doing performance management and what have you done since you’ve rolled out this new approach?

Andrew Cole:
Yeah, so for years I have said that the old traditional performance review, the meeting at the end of the year was neither benefiting the employee nor the organization. And so we had the opportunity within Vertiv to essentially move that process to one side fairly quickly. And what we did was that we introduced the quarterly conversations, and we made it very, very simple. The employee gets to ask of the manager three questions, what is it that you want me to start, stop, and continue? And the employee gets to ask the same three questions of the manager. In the first quarter, I will tell you, the managers complained about, “Now you want me to meet with my employees quarterly instead of on an annual basis, have you lost your mind, Mr. Cole?” And it moved from awkward conversations in the first quarter to feedback from both the manager and the employees that it became more comfortable in the third quarter. And by the fourth quarter, you had employees that were now nudging the managers to say, “Hey, where’s my quarterly conversation? It’s not on the calendar.” 

And the point was this, I firmly believe, in watching this happen, that it was the foundation of the development of a new understanding of trust in the company because remember I said earlier, we came from a culture that was very much fear-based, and now we had a situation where employees and managers were sitting down and actually seeing each other for who they were and not doing it in some kind of a judgmental format, which is what the old traditional performance review process almost always ended up setting up.

Ingrid Cullen:
Yeah. And it’s great that we’re seeing the employees really advocating for these conversations. It’s not just a top-down process. Just to share for the audience anecdotes, in this past quarter, Vertiv had over 90% completion across over 13,000 employees. Over 90% completed their conversations. And in a follow-up survey, it was about 80% agreed or strongly agreed that those conversations were beneficial. So we really saw, you hear Andrew mentioned at the beginning, 24 out of 26 metrics of organizational effectiveness were ranked at the bottom. That’s a pretty substantial change that we saw in just a few years.

Something else I was thinking about with your approach to performance management that I remember was a challenge at the beginning was being a global organization, you have a lot of different cultures around performance and people have a lot of different expectations. In some places, people expect to have a really strong rating. In some places, they don’t. How did you manage those different cultural approaches to performance management?

Andrew Cole:
Yeah. So first of all, I would say that as part of our values and our understanding of respect, respect does not mean that we treat everybody equally. Respect, fundamentally in the organization, means that we, in some cases, treat people very differently depending on where they are in relation to their performance. Meaning that some people, for example, need far more coaching and development and face time with a manager than others do. And so just putting a 15-minute conversation into the calendar for everybody on your team on a biweekly basis is not going to necessarily get it done. 

And so one of the things that we did was helping managers understand that it’s in fact treating people, meeting them where they are, and giving them what they need in order to be successful is what’s really treating them with respect. That was a significant mind shift for many of our managers as they looked at the distribution of their employees.

Second of all, I would say that around the world, you’re absolutely right. I mean, in some cultures it is not okay for you to speak your mind openly to your manager, and it’s just not the way you operate. Within Vertiv, we went out of our way to establish that you can live in a culture, you can be in a country that has a culture that is diametrically opposed to the one that we’re saying in Vertiv. But you cannot be a manager or an employee in Vertiv and not embrace our values and where we are going with this program. Remember, the program was eleVate. It was not about the tool. The tool was a huge part of giving transparency and getting us there and leveraging it all, but it was never about the tool. It was always about how we interacted with each other.

The final thing that I would say is that when you are transforming an organization, it is almost impossible, when you have fear at the base of the culture, to ask employees to take a risk because they won’t do it because the fear is in their face of failure or of retaliation or whatever it is. And so we knew we had to remove that to transform the company.

And when we did it, and as we slowly but surely started to see it fade away into the background, the employees embrace an engagement and the owning of the problems in the company, and their suggestions through Betterworks and through their conversations just took off. And in our last survey, we had over 40,000 comments or suggestions on what it is that they would like to see us do better or build upon. Our employees are truly engaged in the success of the organization.

Ingrid Cullen:
That’s really incredible. Looking at your program, so we’ve touched on the OKRs, the conversations between managers and their employees. One thing that Vertiv has added in the past year is 360 feedback, so having individuals collect feedback from people other than their managers. Can you talk a little bit about how you think about 360 feedback and how it plays out at Vertiv?

Andrew Cole:
Yeah, so 360 originally was designed with the whole purpose of benefiting the employee. And over the years, some organizations have taken it where they get 360, they get the information, et cetera. And it’s different philosophies for different organizations. Inside of Vertiv, the feedback both that they get inside of our eleVate program and when they go to offsite instructions and they get 360-degree feedback absolutely belongs solely to the employee. And then if or when the employee chooses to share that feedback with the manager or with their peers, then we welcome that. And that’s obviously something that is a further demonstration of building a foundation of trust. But the entire process is built on the fact that when an employee is giving another employee feedback, they’re giving it from a sense of caring or wanting to make the person better, to build them up to help them understand what they could do differently or build upon to have the output of their work be seen in a more positive light than what it currently may be seen as.

Ingrid Cullen:
Yeah, one thing I would just add that I’ve seen Vertiv do with feedback is make it part of these leadership development and training programs that you put on for your leadership, and right now it’s a follow-up action. If you are a manager who participates in the Managing at Vertiv training program, when you finish that training, one of your assignments is to ask your peers for feedback and to collect that feedback. And so I think that’s a really smart way to give people information, but then also give them the next step to actually change their behavior and get that information.

Andrew Cole:
We do it in the stakeholder feedback at the end of the year conversation as well, where as part of our process we’ve got where we normally say to the employee, “We want to have three individuals that are stakeholders in your output, your work output that we would like you to get feedback from.” And we do that through the system. And it has been really phenomenal participation.

Ingrid Cullen:
Yeah, and I would agree that we’ve seen people really are participating in this, they’re taking advantage of it. And I think it really goes to some of the things you’ve touched on, that people are seeing that it’s there to benefit them. I think that’s been really big. Something else I’ve been thinking about is we’re coming up on four years of working together, and this transformation has really happened in incremental steps. And I think sometimes I see organizations that they know they need to change and they want it to happen really quickly. And I think it’s valuable to be bold and move fast, but there are some things that just take time. And so how would you advise other leaders on how to think about making a real lasting change?

Andrew Cole:
Yeah, so I’ll answer that question by telling another story for a minute. So there was another organization that I was engaged with that had essentially implemented Betterworks that had not necessarily gone as well. And it was very much a top-down approach, “This is what we’re going to do, this is when we’re going to do it by, et cetera, et cetera.” And for all the reasons listed above, it did not take off. And HR’s role in that was almost like a police department going around, “You need to update your metrics, you need to update your Betterworks because we’re going to run the report.” And I learned a huge amount from that lesson, watching it, because human behavior, they want to understand the why. Why are we setting out to do this? And again, it’s not about the tool. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times, is that the tool is simply what helps you to get there.

But when we set out about doing this, and yes, four years ago, it seems like a lifetime now, right? But I will tell you, we were very clear about the fact that this was a crawl, walk, run experience and we needed to understand the pilot was going to be important. The after-action review, the implementation of the lessons learned from the after-action review, the implementation globally, the understanding that when mistakes are made, we own them. And we never tried to hide them. We never tried to push them under the table or pretend that it wasn’t there. The other thing that I would say is that, and I put some of the credit down, in fairness to you and directly from Betterworks, is that there were never blame discussions that happened between our organizations.

When we partnered on this, we understood that we had to do this together, and we made plenty of mistakes ourselves, I know. We had to go take action on them to fix them, but then when mistakes were made on your side, you owned them and together we went about fixing them. And incrementally we grew through the four years to truly get to an experience of a transformed culture where eleVate is at the foundation of how we run our business. And by the way, last comment is that we have had an amazing number of comments from our customers on how they have seen the transformation in how the employees interact with them in the marketplace. And I don’t think there’s any other bigger compliment that we could receive than from our customers.

Ingrid Cullen:
Wow, that’s really incredible. That’s really incredible to hear. Thinking about everything that you’ve done with building this program at Vertiv, what are some of the next things that Vertiv wants to tackle with eleVate? What are the ways that you want to continue to evolve your performance program?

Andrew Cole:
So transformation never ends, and we all know, coming out of the year that we’ve come out of, life will throw you a curveball in a heartbeat, and it’s our job to make sure that we respond to it. And one of the things that we have seen very clearly coming out of this year of COVID, our employees want to actually feel more connected to the organization. They want more connectivity to their manager, they want more connectivity to their peers, not less. And I’m sure that working remotely has played into that. So what is it that we are going to do as an organization as we go forward to make sure there’s more of that kind of interaction? 

The other thing that we have done is that this idea that employees drive into the parking lot or get off of the train or put their bike to one side and they walk in the doors of the building and they’re suddenly at work and then everything else that makes them a human being is left to one side, it’s just a fallacy. I mean, we are who we are as human beings, and one of the things that we’ve been driving is this idea of bringing your whole self to work so that you can be who you are in the workplace and not have fear. And if it’s a case that the kids didn’t get off to the bus in time this morning, then that is something that you can bring to work, and we acknowledge that you are dealing with that in the workplace. So being more understanding is a big part of what we’re after.

However, in having said that, we are also very much a results-oriented organization and we have a tendency for action that is really, really high, and sometimes too high. But I will tell you that our dependency and leaning on metrics around all aspects of our management of our population is becoming far greater. And ultimately, I believe we’re not there within Vertiv yet, but I do believe within the next two or three years, within certain areas, we get to predictive analytics around our population.

Ingrid Cullen:
Wow. How do you think you’ll use those predictions?

Andrew Cole:
Yeah, so if I look at one example, we are faced with a reality within Vertiv where between 15 and 25% of the population around the globe, depending on the area, are looking at coming up to retirement age. And if we are simply going to have a strategy that goes out to the market to hire people into the roles to replace them, it will be, first of all, enormously expensive. Second of all, I don’t believe it’s actually doable because the skillset is already really scarce in the market.

So one of the things that we are doing is looking at colleges and universities around the world that have got stellar programs that are out there, and we’re looking at the data around the graduates that are coming out of those programs. And then we are measuring when they come into Vertiv, how are they performing, how quickly are they getting promoted? Is it the case that they’re exiting the organization within 24, 36 months? All of that data is being compiled in such a way that it is guiding our decision-making on what educational institutions should we be building stronger relationships in so that we can get 10 to 15 percent of graduates every year.

Ingrid Cullen:
Great. We have a couple questions coming in the chat, and I encourage anyone who has questions, feel free to chime in with them as well, but I’ll continue to field these. So following up on the question about analytics, there’s a question, will we lose the human aspect if we place too much emphasis on predictive analytics?

Andrew Cole:
Yeah. It’s a great question, and it’s always that really fine line that we’re walking. And I believe that as HR professionals, we have got to pay attention to both sides of the line. I think that HR, or if I reach back to when I started in this job to when they referred to it as personnel, a lot of the time it was about employees coming into the organization and leaving their complaints and their concerns on your desk, and then you had to go figure out what it is you were going to go do about it.

Predictive analytics, in many ways, when I look at the data, we can actually get out ahead of somebody walking into the office and complaining about it. It actually is a great way to be able to see the fact that there is a problem that is looming and it would be better if we as leaders started talking about it now rather than waiting for it to actually be a problem that manifests itself in our population.

I would also say that if there is one thing about human resources organizations, and I believe this at my core, to be very honest with you, is that our number one responsibility is to make sure that we are the gatekeepers of the culture of the company. And the values cannot be simply something that is written up on some placard in some entry hall, that actually nobody goes to anymore these days, but it cannot simply be a poster. It has to be something that is lived out. And I believe that we will be able to walk that line under conditions that we treat the responsibility around the values and respect for employees in our organizations with the same amount of value as the metrics that we end up putting up in front of our executive team on a quarterly basis.

Ingrid Cullen:
Okay. And then there’s actually another question about how do you measure your current culture.

Andrew Cole:
Okay, so we’ve got a company that we engage with to conduct a survey, and they have a very, very strong analytical back office part to their organization. And we ask a set of 20-plus questions, and then our participation globally this time was in excess of 86%. Our engagement rating across the globe was 76%, which is up fairly significantly since our last one. And our provider is able to drill down into the data and then is able to provide actionable points for each manager without disclosing or breaching confidentiality, which is a really big deal. So if there’s any manager that has five employees or less, we actually keep the feedback or the analytics really high so it’s not possible to be able to trace it back to one individual.

Ingrid Cullen:
Yeah, and if I remember correctly from one of the times you did this survey, one of the follow-up items was that your leaders actually set OKRs around specific actions that they were going to take that were the recommendations from the survey. So I think that was just another way that we took, we want people to make a change, here’s how we’re actually going to get them to make that change.

Andrew Cole:
Yeah, I mean, I can give you a concrete example. So back in 2016 when the survey was taken, one of the poorest scoring areas was interaction with executives. And it was really bad. And so what we did was we pulled together a schedule of how many times an executive was actually going to be face-to-face with employees in a given month or quarter, and then we also pulled together PowerPoint presentations that were rolled out every quarter that they could draw on in order to talk to the population.

The point was that instead of saying, “Yes, we need our executives to be more in front of our employees,” we actually put a concrete plan, Ingrid, to your point, on what the executives really needed to be doing when they got out of bed in the morning to move this number forward and have the employees recognize that we meant what we said when we were going to pay attention to it.

Ingrid Cullen:
Great. And then here’s a comment that just came up, “So if I understand, HR will be seen as a true business partner for some organizations, especially with predictive analytics.”

Andrew Cole:
So I will tell you that inside of HR in Vertiv, there may be someone in HR who does not believe that they’re treated as an HR business partner, so I won’t say everyone. But I talk to my HR team around the world every single week, and what I will tell you is that the number one focal point for many of our conversations is in fact business issues that they are looking to solve with their business leaders.

Now, of course, we talk about HR-specific issues of compensation, benefits, employee relations, union negotiations. But the conversation is always coupled with the business situation or scenario that that business leader finds themselves in, and so it’s never a discussion on an HR item that’s simply happening in isolation of the business. And it all comes down to, in my opinion, it comes down to the fact that we have put together an HR executive team that has come out of this kind of an environment and therefore truly does understand what it means to be a business partner with those business leaders.

Ingrid Cullen:
Yeah. And then what you’re saying is it really sounds like HR is an enabler for the organization.

Andrew Cole:
You’re an enabler, no doubt about it. I mean, if we look at spot bonuses as an example, I mean, spot bonuses can be something that come into an HR office whereby there’s a request being made, “Can I give 25 of my people a spot bonus because they did an awesome job?” And the answer from an HR professional can be, “Sure, you’ve got it within your budget, that’s no problem. Let’s go ahead and do it.” Versus having the conversation with them, “Why that person? Why now? What did they deliver that was different than this person who’s not getting a spot bonus?” By taking the time to actually ask those questions, you are helping the leaders to really, one, think about their people, but two, to understand better the business scenario in which that HR tool is being leveraged in the organization.

Ingrid Cullen:
Great. And then we’re coming up on time, so I have one last question, and if anyone else has anything they want to share, please add to that. But how do you make sure that these changes last? How do you make sure that things don’t slip back into old habits over time?

Andrew Cole:
Every single day you have to get up and you have to remind yourself where the organization is going. And I’m not kidding when I say that. It’s got to be at the forefront of your mind every day, what are the objectives? So we started out by talking about three-year objectives, and we talked about crawl, walk, run. And sometimes I would get business leaders, CEOs, and even members of the board saying, “Well, when will we get there? When are we going to know that we’re there?”

And the truth of the matter is we’re never there, but you can slide backward and you can allow negativity and you can allow disrespect and you can allow all of these things that you’ve worked so hard to creep back into the company, but it’s only by making sure that you constantly have an objective that’s out in front of you. This is why OKRs, in my opinion, are so important, because the strategy continually changes, but it’s the culture that enables you to be able to execute the strategy. And so if you don’t nurture the culture and you don’t take care of the people that are within the culture, no matter how good your strategy is, your ability to be able to execute it is going to be significantly diminished. So keep it always in the forefront of your mind what your objective is.

Ingrid Cullen:
Great. I think we may have time for one more question we had come through from the chat. There have been a few sessions throughout the day in which speakers have considered the relationship between OKRs and DE&I, so diversity, equity, and inclusion work. What thoughts do you have on that topic related to organizational transformation?

Andrew Cole:
So as somebody who wasn’t born and raised in the United States, and so as an Irish guy in this conversation, it is always interesting to me how we end up in this conversation. Fundamentally, why is diversity and inclusion so important? It’s important because of the richness of the decision-making. When you end up allowing different ideas to come into the discussion and you allow it to influence the thinking of the organization globally, it makes the overall organization stronger. It fundamentally makes it better globally. 

And so with that as an understanding on why this is important, I see it very much from an OKR perspective that we have got to be out there looking for the best minds in the business for every single role because one of the most important decisions that we make as HR professionals is what candidates to bring in and put in front of hiring managers. 

And in order for us to make sure that we’re doing that, we have got to make sure that our processes of attracting candidates are wide open to include that diversity of thinking and inclusion. But if it’s not and if it is closed over, then why would an individual from a different culture, different background, different ethnicity, why would they bother knocking on your door or looking at an opportunity when right now, more than ever, there are so many companies around the world that understand that they have not been doing the job that they needed to do on making sure that diversity and inclusion was at the forefront of their thinking?

Ingrid Cullen:
Great. That’s a really good point. I think we’re at the bottom of the hour, so we’re going to end on that wonderful note. Thank you, Andrew, so much for participating. Really appreciate your insights and your perspective, and always a pleasure to catch up with you here.

Andrew Cole:
I hope it was helpful. Great seeing you again. Take care.

Ingrid Cullen:
All right. Take care everyone.

Andrew Cole:
Bye-bye.