How Z Energy Increased Employee Engagement Through OKRs

Megan Bryant:
Thank you for everyone that’s joining us here today to talk about how has Z Energy increased employee engagement through OKRs and continuous conversations. Before we get into it, I’d just like to go ahead and introduce the two of us speaking today. So I am Megan Bryant. As I said, I am a customer success manager at Betterworks, and I’m joined here by one of our clients, Julie. And I’ll pass it over to you, Julie, so you can introduce yourself.

Julie Fitzgerald:
Hi, I’m Julie Fitzgerald. I’m the organizational learning manager here at Z Energy in New Zealand. Z Energy is a downstream fuel company, so we run retail gas stations, but we also have aviation customers and marine customers and bitumen and all sorts, so. And we just operate in New Zealand. We’ve got about 250 service stations in New Zealand. So on a US scale, that’s kind of tiny, but for New Zealand, we’re quite big.

Megan Bryant:
Well, fantastic, and thrilled to have you here today and share your story with others. Before we get started, we actually wanted to go ahead and ask a question from the audience. Get to know one another here. So Julie is from New Zealand. I myself am just outside of Seattle, in Washington in the US. And for those joining us today, feel free to drop in the chat where you’re from. We’d love to see where you are around the world joining us today.

We’ve got some South America here, Bolivia, Philadelphia, Dallas, Texas, in the US. Oh, Florida. California. Very nice, got Los Angeles.

Julie Fitzgerald:
Got some Kiwis.

Megan Bryant:
There you go. Well, thanks for playing along. We’ll ask you to play along throughout the presentation by just dropping into that same chat window any questions that you have. Certainly, we’ll allow some time at the end of this presentation to answer as many questions as possible. If we don’t get to them, we do have a follow-up opportunity to answer any questions as well.

So please do as we’re going along, follow along with us, and drop any chats in there, any questions that you have. Alright. 

Before we get started here, I actually wanted to talk to you about where Z Energy started, and we’re going to take you through a storyline format here for the webinar today to share this story of where Z Energy came from in November 2019 and where they are today, or most recently, as of September 2021.

As you can see here, we’re sharing some results or impacts that the Betterworks program has been able to provide to Z Energy as a company and there is a true impact here. We’ll wrap this up in the end and discuss how important this truly is, but we did want to foreshadow here to get you excited about the content to come. 

Alright. So moving along into the story, Julie, tell us a little bit about where you were at the beginning and when you decided that Z Energy needed to make a change.

Julie Fitzgerald:
Yeah. So Z Energy is about 11 years old. We were originally a Shell New Zealand, and then Shell sold their downstream business and so Z Energy was born 11 years ago. And from the beginning Z’s been really quite clear on our purpose. So our why has always been really clear for us. 

This picture is from a document called the Z Why, and you can see our employees or our people are represented on one side of the picture and then our customers on the other. And what’s been really clear for our people from the beginning is our values, our capabilities, our strategy, the things that we stand for all in service of making a difference to customers. What we realized in the last couple of years is where we weren’t so strong is prioritizing the right things to deliver and making sure that those things were delivered. So we kind of were clear on purpose and strategy and really strong in those areas, but we kind of had an execution problem.

And I think what was happening is all of our people were setting their own goals. They were loosely aligned to strategy, but they weren’t necessarily working on the things that made the most difference for our customers. So we realized that we really needed to tighten that focus, help our people get really clear on what they needed to be working on and give them great feedback on when they were doing the right stuff and I guess get better at prioritizing the things that really shift the dial.

So that’s where we sort of recognized we needed to make some change. So we kind of summarized the key themes on this slide. We didn’t have clear line of sight for our people between the strategy and their operational activity, so how what they did contributed to the strategy. And we didn’t have line of sight either of what everybody was working on. So we weren’t sure what was being delivered and what was making a difference.

And we also had quite a long business cadence. So we kind of planned on an annual basis and we thought that shorter time cycles would accelerate things for us. And we were so good at recognition for extraordinary performance, but we weren’t so great at recognizing when people met expectations, which is really important. And we knew we needed to get better at feedback. So this was kind of the canvas we were looking at when we went searching for a tool to help us. We sort of knew we wanted to do OKRs and we knew we wanted to get better at conversations and feedback and then we kind of went shopping and that’s how we found Betterworks, so.

Megan Bryant:
Excellent. So you had a clear case for what you were trying to achieve when you had brought on your Betterworks journey?

Julie Fitzgerald:
We did.

Megan Bryant:
Fantastic. So getting into your Betterworks journey, how did you get started? What did you start with?

Julie Fitzgerald:
Well, one of the reasons we chose Betterworks was for the user experience, and the other thing was the amount of tailoring that we could do in Betterworks. So this slide here is a picture from a whiteboard animation that we did for our people when we were introducing OKRs. Because OKRs was the thing we went, “Look, actually OKRs is going to help us get more focused, give clearer line of sight and help us understand the things that shift the dial.”

And so the Betterworks tool helps us with OKRs. But we did this picture to say to our people, “This is how it all fits.” So our people were really clear on that. If you look at the middle top, that, “Solving what matters for a moving world,” that’s our purpose. So our people were really clear on that and also clear on the strategic objectives.

But as we move down the slide, the bit that was new was actually let’s translate that into clear quarterly objectives and let’s translate that into pieces of work that we call initiatives so that people can see what I’m working on is contributing to strategy. And the analogy we use for that is in the middle of the slide you’ll see our North Star, so that’s the where are we headed?

And we represent our teams of people as the people in the Waka, the canoe, and in the sailboat. And the analogy we’re using is, “This is where we’re headed, everyone. We’re heading towards the North Star.” So if at any point your team is going off track, so no longer heading there, you need to course correct. But also on an individual basis, if you are fishing off the back of the boat and that’s not helping us get towards the North Star, you need to kind of stop doing what you’re doing and do something that contributes better to us achieving our goals.” So this was kind of how we set the scene for OKRs for our people. 

And then that segues really nicely into the conversations, and feedback and recognition piece because then we get down to what this means for individuals within teams. And like I said before, I think we were pretty strong on recognizing extraordinary performance. So in the middle of the slide at the top of the triangle, you can see hero nominations and SRAs. Those were our reward schemes and recognition schemes and prizes for our extraordinary performers. But the stuff going down the triangle is like, “Actually, why don’t you just say thank you?” Or ‘ka pai’ is Māori for well done. Why don’t you just say thank you when people do a great job and acknowledge when they’ve done a great job and what mechanisms do we have to create that? So the Betterworks shout-outs really help with that.

And then the other thing that was a big shift for us was the conversations piece. So we used to run an annual performance contract with our people. And while it was intended to be updated regularly as context changed, they rarely got updated. People set their own goals in that performance contract and often those goals didn’t have a clear line of sight to strategy and there wasn’t clear visibility for anybody about how people were progressing. So the conversations piece has been really powerful for us.

Megan Bryant:
And let’s take a deeper dive into these conversations because you both have the OKR aspect and the conversations, feedback, and recognition, and they have to play together in order to make this impact that we’ve been able to see in your organization. So let’s take a deeper dive into those conversations and talk a little bit more about those.

Julie Fitzgerald:
Sure. So we leapt in fully with conversations. We didn’t ease our way in at all. We just went, “Look, if we’re going to do this thing, let’s do it.” So we already had an annual individual development planning conversation, so we put that straight into Betterworks. Because what we had was the individual development planning conversation, but again, we didn’t have good visibility of who was having those, whether they were happening or not. And our people were telling us they wanted more career kind of focus. So we popped that straight in Betterworks. So we were prompting people and their leaders to have that conversation. They do that annually, but then they build a plan that then they can use for the rest of the year. We also had an end-of-year wrap-up conversation already as well. So we kept that, but we sort of tweaked it a bit and popped that into Betterworks. Because we had an annual performance contract, so we wrapped up things at the end of the year. 

This is where we do our performance rating and calibration. So we kept that process. So that’s still done. But what was often the problem with that conversation was that there was recency bias because people had only focused on what had just happened and people didn’t take great notes during the year. And so people often felt incomplete after that conversation because it didn’t represent necessarily how they felt about their performance for the whole year. And if they hadn’t had enough feedback during the year, the end of year wrap up could sometimes end up a bit of a surprise for people, which isn’t great. So that’s why we introduced these other two conversations, the goal set and retro and the check-in or the 1:1. So the goal set and retro conversation happens every quarter. So we no longer have that annual performance contract.

We set goals every quarter, they line up to our company OKRsm and they also line up to the priorities of the individual teams. We start by looking back, so what went well last quarter? What did we learn? What could we do better? And then the learning from the prior quarter informs how we set goals for the current quarter. And we set goals for delivery against OKRs, delivery of the core purpose of my role, which may not necessarily be linked to an OKR, but I have a day job that I need to do like paying people for example. So what are my KPIs for that? And then we have people set a development goal every quarter as well. So they pull that from their individual development plan and put it in as a quarterly goal and that kind of helps people keep momentum with their development plan. And then we had the check-in, and the check-in is a minimum frequency of fortnightly.

So we’d always said, “You need to check in with your people regularly,” but again, we had no visibility about how often check-ins were happening, whether they were happening, what quality they were. Everybody was kind of using different mechanisms. Some people kept notes in OneNote, some people had them in their calendars, some people did them quite casually when they went for a walk, whatever. Some of those worked really well.

But the feedback was telling us that our people weren’t clear on their goals, not clear on how they were going, and not getting enough feedback. So we put quite a tight structure around check-ins and we said, “You know what? You need to check in at least fortnightly.” So we set a minimum frequency. And on those conversations, people update against how they’re going against their goals. They celebrate wins.

So direct reports get to tell their manager what they want to be acknowledged for, and managers go, “Hey, I heard this great thing that you did. I want to acknowledge you for that.” And it really helps people course correct. So if you go back to the boat analogy, it’s like actually, is our boat still heading towards the North Star? And is your role on the boat still contributing to that? Is there anything we need to pivot on? Is there anything we need to say, “Look, actually that’s not as important as what we thought it would be at the start of the quarter, but this is now.” So it really helps people stay on track, feel valued, feel acknowledged, and feel really clear on what’s expected. So that’s the conversations framework.

Megan Bryant:
Wow, Julie, you shared a lot within that, and that’s all real rich and goodness that contributes to the impact that you’ve been able to see. So I do just want to ask a few questions here. Often we get Betterworks customers that ask, “How frequently should we have conversations? Which conversations should we have?” And you had talked about, “Okay, prior to Betterworks, we had this yearly individual planning conversation. We had this end-of-year wrap-up, but we’ve added these additional conversations.” Some of our customers are very hesitant to add more conversations, but it seems to be a success for you. And so talk to us a little bit about how you found this good ratio of conversations and why these really matter to have these ongoing conversations incorporated into your program.

Julie Fitzgerald:
Yeah. We had to lean in quite a bit actually with our people because this is all time, right? So you look at all of these conversations and you think, “That’s time that I’m not delivering. So I don’t have time to do this.” And the way we framed it was, you don’t have time not to do this. Because if you wait three months before you talk to your direct report about whether or not they’ve delivered on their quarterly goals only to find out haven’t, there’s a cost in there for the business. They’ve wasted a bunch of time where they could have been contributing something that really has an impact.

There’s also, if people don’t get regular feedback on how they’re going, their engagement’s going to go down and we might lose them as well. So we can’t afford not to regularly tell our people and help them have line of sight to how they’re contributing to the delivery of strategy. So while we got some resistance on this, we were really, really firm on minimum fortnightly. It doesn’t have to be a long conversation, but it needs to be minimum fortnightly.

And we’re also really tough on, “And you have to use the conversation template we set up,” because I think the other thing is while lots of people were having check-in conversations, they might go on for 45 minutes but not actually talk about anything that really matters. So you might talk about results in a really loose way, but not a show me, don’t tell me way. Or you might say, “Yeah, are you on track?” “Yeah, I’m on track.” And it’s like, are you really though? People don’t necessarily want to lean into the harder things to talk about. So by prompting that with questions, it helps us get to the nitty-gritty faster and really make a difference. So I’m a big advocate of regular check-ins. And it was funny actually when we did this in the beginning, there’s all this resistance upfront and I just said, “Look, just do it. Just try it. Just try it for a quarter.” And once we were a quarter in, people were seeing the benefit and all of that resistance just went away. So I guess, the proof’s in that really.

Megan Bryant:
Yeah. And I can imagine because you’re very narrow-focused on what you’re trying to achieve within these. So it’s goal alignment, looking at progress against those goals, talking about employees’ development, and breaking down any barriers. And you did mention that you set up the questions in order to allow to have these conversations across the board. So let’s take a look into one of those questions that you created in your check-in conversations and talk a little bit more about how this helps to drive again towards the results and impacts that you’ve seen as well.

Julie Fitzgerald:
Yeah. So these are our check-in conversation templates. And the questions are being designed to ask the right stuff so that upfront people are getting the right stuff into the conversation. So, “How are you progressing against your goals?” is kind of an obvious one. But one question that’s really had an amazing impact is the fourth question on our check-in which is, “How confident are you that you’ll achieve all your goals this quarter?”

And this one’s amazing because I find even for myself, if I’m going, “Actually I’m only a three,” sometimes I don’t stop for long enough during the quarter to think about how confident I am I’m going to achieve everything. But if I fortnightly go, “Oh gosh, I’m only at a three, why am I at a three?” I can unpack for myself even before I have the conversation with my leader, “Oh, it’s blocked on this thing or because this other stuff’s come in that I’m working on, that’s actually not in my goals list. So now I need to have a conversation about whether I should be working on that or whether I need to renegotiate some stuff.” So this question’s been enormously powerful for self-coaching. So sometimes I deal with stuff myself before I have the conversation, but also for leaders to go, “You said you’re only a three, so what’s getting in the way of a five? What could we do to get you to a five? We all agreed this stuff’s really important. So what do we need to do to free you up or get you some extra resources or get a barrier out of the way?” So this is just accelerating delivery, getting people really supported to deliver and they’re not getting to the end of the quarter and feeling like they’re being hit over the hand for not achieving, they’re feeling kind of side by side with their leader during the quarter supported to deliver. So the conversation’s almost like a job aid for Great Manager 101 stuff, and it’s kind of paint by numbers really. So it’s worked really well.

Megan Bryant:
Yeah. And I love this. And you shared with me in previous conversations that even if it is a check-in to say every two weeks, everything is going well, it’s an opportunity to reinforce what you’re doing here and to keep people on track. Because I think it’s the lack thereof. If it wasn’t there, it wouldn’t be able to steer that ship accordingly. And so it is important that despite having no updates or everything’s on track is my update, that’s where that quick check-in comes into play. And so I think you had mentioned we only do this for about 15 minutes a week. It is a quick touch base, but it is certainly that opportunity to catch something on an ongoing basis so that we’re steering that ship in the right direction.

Julie Fitzgerald:
Totally.

Megan Bryant:
And you also noted another element about having to enable managers through this process as well. So perhaps new leaders or developing leaders. And how does that impact them as well?

Julie Fitzgerald:
Yeah. I think like I said, it is like a job aid for leaders. So you’ll see there’s a purpose for the conversation. There are some open questions that allow leaders to answer them so they’re set up really well. But there are also links to resources on our intranet for leaders as well. So it’s like when you’re having this conversation, if you want some more support, this is where you’ll find some more resources. Whereas if you just say to leaders, “Have regular check-ins with your people” and let them do it, some of them will do it really well and others won’t necessarily know where to start or what to do. I find that’s particularly common when you have technical experts who are then promoted to lead a technical team, but they’ve never led people before. This just provides them with really, really good support.

They really just follow the process and the process then helps them set the scene for really good performance. And then they learn faster because they have more wins early on and then they go, “Well, that worked. I’m going to keep doing that.” So we find this is a really good on-the-job learning support for our leaders, which is great.

But it also puts the conversations in the hands of direct reports as well. So it’s not all led by the leader. It’s like actually most of the questions I’m answering for me when I talk to my leader puts me in the driver’s seat a little bit. So even if my leader’s not so experienced, I can sort of make sure that we’re talking about the things that really matter. So kind of comes from both, which is why I say it’s a side by side kind of approach.

Megan Bryant:
Yeah. And that’s fantastic. It’s enabling everybody with the same opportunity, same opportunity to talk about those things that matter and ensure that we are working towards those things that matter and we’re all aligned.

Julie Fitzgerald:
Yeah.

Megan Bryant:
Fantastic story. So I’m actually going to go ahead and jump into your results slide again, and we can talk through this a little bit in more context here. I did a foreshadowing in the beginning, so we’re seeing the same results here on this right-hand side. 

Your Betterworks journey started in November of 2019. So in just a short two years here, you’ve been able to see tremendous impact across the board in terms of strategy, OKRs, but even the people element, the performance management, the feedback, how folks are feeling within the organization. So Julie, can you talk to us a little bit more about what we’re looking at here and why this is such an impactful change and success story for Z Energy?

Julie Fitzgerald:
Sure. So probably just to start, these scores are eNPS. So for those of you less familiar with eNPS, the scale is actually 200. So if you’ve got anybody who answers a six or below out of 10 for any of the questions, they’re a detractor. So they get subtracted from your overall score and people have to answer a nine or a 10 for it to be a positive score. So getting a positive NPS is actually pretty good, and scores over 50 are very good in the NPS. That’s also why there’s a negative one there because we had some more detractors for that one. 

So these are the measures that we identified kind of going into this program to go, what would we want to see a shift in by implementing our continuous performance, which is what we wrap around conversations, recognition, feedback, and OKRs, this kind of approach? And I guess, the questions kind of speak for themselves, but we know that the success of our strategy depends on our people understanding and believing in it. So by introducing OKRs and giving people that clear view of, “Well, this is our purpose,” and then linking that to the strategy and then being able to turn that into pieces of work that deliver on strategy, it really helps our people understand where we’re heading long-term and where we’re heading short-term. And the way that they’re relating to that is certainly improved over time from 21 to 53.

The goal-setting one is less about, while it’s important, linking goals to the strategy, it was just helping people understand that their work is important and helping them to have clear expectations. So it’s not rewarding for anybody to feel like you’re on a treadmill all day and not getting anywhere. So you’re kind of doing all of this work, but you don’t see how it connects. And one of the things that Betterworks has really helped us to do is, in our individual conversations, help people see how what they’re doing on that treadmill every single day is really making a difference for our customers and helping us deliver on strategy. So while they might not talk about strategy, our people will talk about customers as well.

And then the communicating of goals, just having the visibility in Betterworks has been amazing. So at any point in time, anybody in the firm can go in and see how we’re going and they can cheer people on and they can comment on stuff. So it’s really, really powerful that way. I think in resetting goals, it’s moving from that annual cadence to that quarterly cadence. And by not setting an annual goal, because even though the intent was if we set an annual goal, you can change it, people don’t change it. Once they’ve set something in concrete, they tend not to change it. So by only setting things for a shorter period of time, people have got more comfortable with, “Actually this is all I know right now and this is what I think is important.”

And then the check-in conversations have enabled better, “Actually, if that’s no longer important, let’s reset that.” So while we’ve always intended that, this is the first time we’ve actually achieved that, which is awesome. And I think knowing what’s expected of you every day at work and thinking that that’s going to happen through giving someone a job description, it doesn’t work. I think about what I do every day and when I look at my job description, they’re linked and aligned, but I don’t get from my job description what I need to be doing every day. I get clear on what I need to be doing every day through the feedback that I get fortnightly. It’s like, “Yep, that’s adding value. Keep doing that. Actually, stop doing that. That’s not adding value anymore,” even though that might be in my job description.

So I think regularly setting expectations with people has helped people get really clear on what’s expected, and then they’ve got that line of sight to the North Star and then they feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves and it all kind of flows through. So it’s there in the numbers really. You can see how OKRs and conversations, feedback, and recognition have kind of influenced across all of these measures. So it’s been pretty cool, actually. Pretty satisfying.

Megan Bryant:
Yeah, absolutely. And Betterworks having this strategy to connect people to results and strategy is really aligned with what you were trying to achieve here and what you have been able to achieve. And so in terms of digesting that into what specifically does that mean, that’s where you’ve been able to break that down through employee NPS and measuring that and gauging that and asking those questions in order to drive these results.

I think that’s also a story to tell here too, is where have we come from and where do we want to go and how do we measure that and how do we look at that impact. In addition to those eNPS scores, it’s always a great story when you have employee sentiments that share the same messaging as well. And so we did just want to highlight a couple of the employee sentiments from within the organization here.

As you can see on the screen, it’s really made a tremendous impact from an employee’s point of view as well, in addition to just looking at across-the-board survey results. So all around great success that we’ve seen within your program due to your bringing on Betterworks, implementing the right processes, and really honing in on what are those things that matter to us that we need to track and trend and the things that we need to do in order to ensure that.

And hopefully, we’ve highlighted that here today through telling your story. And thank you so much again for allowing us to share this story. I appreciate everyone in the audience tuning in, and this is the time where we turn it back over to you all for questions. So I’m going to go ahead and stop sharing here for a minute. We’ll pull up that chat bar. If you haven’t dropped a chat into the chat window yet and you have a burning question, please feel free to drop it in now. We are going to answer questions here and then we have just a little follow-up session. Should you want to drop a question after the fact or chat with Julie after this webinar, we’ll give you an opportunity to do that here after the end of the chat. So stay tuned. 

So I have a question here. “We run quarterly conversations at our organization. I find that our conversation completion stalls until the very end of the cycle. Is that something you’ve seen in your organization?”

Julie Fitzgerald:
So, yes. We open our end-of-quarter retro two weeks before the end of the quarter, and we leave it open until two weeks into the quarter so it’s a four-week window. And there are always people that leave it until the last minute. However, what we focused on early on is rather than getting people really skilled up at doing the conversations, we focused on adoption. So we focused on are you doing the conversations? Not, “How well are you doing the conversations?” But, “Are you doing them or are you not?” So we did a lot of sharing of dashboards of, “Oh, this business unit has completed this many check-in conversations or this many goal-setting conversations, and these guys are behind.” We found doing that early on really helped people get into the habit of understanding they’re going to be measured on this whether they did them or not. So it kind of got people putting it in their calendars and stuff. So that helped. 

The other thing is our CEO did some really fantastic role modeling of this, which then trickles down because all of his direct reports, then all their direct reports, that ended up covering everybody. And so right at the beginning, he reorganized his calendar to reflect the conversation cadence. He shared in his blog, “Hey, I’m actually having all of my check-in conversations with all my direct reports on one day, so I’m doing all of that on one day. This is how I’m managing my calendar.” And so that kind of leadership from him, again, it really helped our people to go, “Oh actually, yeah, if I organize my calendar for the year, I can kind of get this organized.” And so we’ve got an enterprise calendar where all the dates are on it as well, which helps.

But then there’s always going to be people that leave it until the last minute and there are always people who are late who I’m chasing. I think that’s just human nature a little bit. But I think if people know you’re measuring, they’re more likely to leave something else to the last minute than this because they know it’s going to end up on a dashboard somewhere.

Megan Bryant:
Yeah. I absolutely agree with that. And that’s something that you touched on outside of what we discussed today. But there is another element to the success of the program is in that we have leadership support here and certainly there is no lack of leadership support even within your CHRO herself really driving this and encouraging folks to participate and proving to the organization the, what’s in it for me or why should I do this? And as we saw from the employee sentiments there, they really do feel like there’s a benefit to them and they’re more encouraged to do it now than getting that push. It’s organic. So I think that’s really fantastic. And you also made a point during the webinar too, to just stick with it.

Julie Fitzgerald:
Yeah.

Megan Bryant:
Even if it’s a slow start at the beginning or even if it’s just, “Just do it, don’t get it right,” getting that momentum going and getting them acclimated to it, eventually it’ll start to gain traction and they’ll see that and believe in that, what’s in it for me?

Julie Fitzgerald:
Yeah. We led the horse to water, potentially we made them drink a bit as well.

Megan Bryant:
Yeah. So do you have any recommendations for engaging employees earlier in the cycle than outside of just pulling those reports, having leadership support? Is there anything else that we can do to encourage this as well?

Julie Fitzgerald:
I think the other thing I would highlight is one of the things we did when we redid our conversations, recognition, and feedback is we replaced what were SRAs, which was a special recognition award for performance, which was all a bit hard to understand for our people, and it was all a bit secret and people didn’t really know what to do and how to get one.

Our new system is called Our Best and it’s much more transparent. And when people win Our Best awards, they’re peer-nominated, there’s a panel within the business unit that decides who’s won. We talk about the link between setting great goals and then exceeding what you’ve set and performance. It all kind of fits in together in that CFR. So I think the way that we recognize people is linked to that, and I think that does help. Yeah. I definitely think that has an impact as well, so.

Megan Bryant:
So reinforcing with recognition as well?

Julie Fitzgerald:
Yeah.

Megan Bryant:
Excellent. Another element of your program as well that we didn’t speak to today, but still has a huge, tremendous impact to the success of your program as well.

Julie Fitzgerald:
Yeah. Totally. All goes hand in hand, right?

Megan Bryant:
It does.

Julie Fitzgerald:
Yeah.

Megan Bryant:
All go hand in hand. Alright, I have another question here. “I think we can do a better job at highlighting not only OKRs, but conversation completings in our departmental meetings. How can we go about doing that?”

Julie Fitzgerald:
Yeah. Well, a couple of things, my PNC business partners or our HR business partners, they had the same adoption goals for Betterworks that I had. So I partnered with them and they sit on each leadership team. So they were on the hook for good conversation adoption, and so they were bringing it to those departmental kind of meetings. It’s like, “Actually, well, this is how we’re going on conversations. What could we be doing?” And a bit of competition doesn’t hurt either. So because they work as a team, they were competing with each other a little bit for the best adoption, which really helped. So, “Hey, we can’t have the supply team beat the retail team. What’s going on here?”

Megan Bryant:
Yeah. Making a little competition there.

Julie Fitzgerald:
Yeah.

Megan Bryant:
Oh, I like it.

Julie Fitzgerald:
So that helped. And for me, the learning was I don’t have to do this all by myself by partnering with other people and also making sure that in Betterworks, their goals were aligned to mine. We’re all kind of working on it together and we could share in that success, which was really cool.

Megan Bryant:
Oh, absolutely. That’s great to hear that component of the program as well. One other question we have here is, “Did your organization schedule the check-in for the entire year or open it up by quarter? In terms of best practices, we’re thinking about that here.”

Julie Fitzgerald:
So we set the goal-setting schedule for the whole year. We use anytime conversations for check-ins though, so we don’t schedule the check-in conversations. And the reason for that is people go on holidays. So we didn’t want people feeling bad about check-ins by having those back up. Because they’re quite frequent, so we didn’t want them to back up. And we also wanted to free people up to do them more often if they wanted to. So we said, “Minimum fortnightly, but if you want to do one every week, go for it. If that’s what works for you, then do it.” And we find that in some of our teams that does work, especially if they’re working in a more agile way, they might have a team standup, and then they might have individual check-ins and then they do their week. So we’ve just wanted to free that up so we don’t schedule the check-ins, they’re anytime conversations. But we do measure, so I sort of have a benchmark that in any quarter the manager and the direct report might both be on holiday, so they both get to skip a check-in. But I’d expect to see check-ins in every other fortnight is how I measure it. So just to make sure they’re not dipping below that minimum fortnightly.

Megan Bryant:
Yeah, that sounds great. Reinforcing that.

Julie Fitzgerald:
Yeah.

Megan Bryant:
I have someone in the audience here who says they work for a startup that is planning to implement OKRs, and they don’t have experience with this and they’re having some resistance to implementing. And I’ll say, this is not uncommon, and this potential client is asking, “I’m wondering if Betterworks could help us to implement OKRs and CFRs.”

And I really do think that as an organization, and certainly Betterworks or Julie, you can attest to this in your program too, but as an organization, we are definitely able and willing to do that through both our tool, our implementation, our specialists internally, and we have tons of tools under our belt in addition to client resources that we can connect you with in order to make this come to life in the organization.

So I definitely think that this is a fantastic platform for both OKRs and CFRs or either or, and it helps to, as we’ve seen in Julie’s story, really make an impact within the organization. So I’ll share that just based on that comment there. And I don’t know if you have any other feedback to provide there too.

Julie Fitzgerald:
The only thing I’d add is our CEO was kind of the person leading the charge on OKRs initially, and then he got on board really quickly with the CFR component. And so it was challenging with some of his direct reports initially getting them on board with OKRs, but because he was leading it really strongly, and we did quite a lot to credential OKRs, so we used a lot of the resources that you provide around, “Oh, well, John Doerr said dot dot dot.” And his other companies that are using them successfully, credentialing OKRs from lots of different organizations is really useful.

Because we had a bit of resistance like, “Well, we’re not a tech company, so OKRs are great for tech companies, but we’re not a tech company, so it doesn’t really work so well for operational businesses.” So by getting access to different experiences from different organizations through our partnership, that really helps get some of those people over the line.

And you’re doing it every day. We’re not done. So you’re constantly engaging people and constantly reinforcing why this is important. We’ve recently got a new OKR champion because our first one didn’t really work out, so we’ve got somebody else sitting in that seat at the moment. So we’re still learning and still constantly engaging people. So I wouldn’t say we’re done, but that certainly helps.

Megan Bryant:
Yeah. And that might be surprising to folks on the call here or somebody else who knows your story, hears your story, and then learns, “Hey, we were actually up against some challenges in the beginning and we continue to face challenges despite these amazing results that we have.” But your message of stick with it, keep doing things that are proven to work, keep seeking out what are those things, asking peers, leveraging Betterworks.

And you certainly do do that, Julie. And just implementing those additional elements. And the more that you do, the more refined you can become over time. But it is a journey. And so I can’t imagine the success that you’re going to have two years from now as you continue to implement these suggestions and ideas. And it’s really important for Julie herself to hear from her peers and learn from her peers as well. So although we’ve showcased Julie’s program here today and the success that she’s been able to find, she’s still always inquiring, what are other customers doing? Can I learn something else? Can I learn some best practices? And so forth.

Like I said, continuous learners here. So thank you all so much for joining in today. I’ll leave you with one last slide here. We do have another session coming up. It is going to be amazing, tons of fantastic speakers, more in-depth storytelling, and experiences from customers and the like in our EmpowerHR session on December first and second. You can check this out at Betterworks.com and register, and we hope to see you all there. Again, thank you so much for the time and we look forward to connecting with you soon. And thanks Julie, really appreciate the time that you’ve given us today.

Julie Fitzgerald:
Oh, my pleasure. Thank you, everyone.

Megan Bryant:
Thank you so much. Bye.

Julie Fitzgerald:
Bye.