Aligning and Empowering a Remote Team with Ally | SaaStr

Hi everyone, and welcome to our session, How to Align and Inspire a Remote Team, presented by myself, Jess Baum, Director of Product Marketing at Ally, and our founder and CEO, Vetri Velour. Today we'll share how leading brands are empowering and aligning the work their remote teams are doing with the proven goal-setting methodology trusted by many of today's top brands. By the end of the session, you'll understand how OKRs provide businesses and their leadership teams the data and insights they need to pivot quickly and address rapidly changing business environments that most of us are facing today. To kick things off, I'd like to introduce Alain, founder and CEO of VetriVeloor.

Thanks, Jess. I'm super excited to be here to discuss this topic. The COVID-19 virus has reshaped not only the way we work but the way we live. It has impacted everything we do and is slowly becoming a new normal. I've been through this economic upheaval once before. Before I founded Ally, I was leading up my previous company and that company was founded in 2007, just a few quarters before the 2008 crash. And that startup also had distributed teams. And we face many of these challenges that we are facing now. And these challenges include how do we ensure everyone is aligned to the top priorities of the business or the team, right? And how do we have this laser-like focus on what really matters? This is especially important when people are working remote, and it's particularly hard these days because even the— what is the priority of the business is evolving. As we are all reacting to this unfolding situation right in front of us. So it is super important to make sure that everyone is aligned as they're working remotely and as the company's priorities shift that they're actually, you know, they know what is really important for them to contribute to. The second one we think about is how do you really keep your team members engaged, right? How do you help them understand the impact they are making every day and how does he make them feel connected to the overall mission of the company and what everyone else is doing? And make them realize that they're making a difference every day even though they're sitting alone in their homes. And the third challenge we think about is how do leaders, managers stay in the know? How do you have visibility at all levels in your organization? And so you can react and understand what's going on and you can react to it before it's too late. Too late. Again, in this highly fluid situation we are in, the ability to have that near real-time visibility and ability to react to it quickly becomes a must-have. We have been using the OKR methodology for many years now to solve these problems. In fact, Ally was built as an internal tool from a previous startup. It had evolved with our own experience of using OKR methodology to solve these kind of changing situations. These challenges over a period of many years. And my previous startup had a good exit, and at the time of exit, Ally was spun off as a separate business. Today what I would like to do is to share our experience of what we have learned in working, doing OKRs ourselves for many, many years, but more importantly, what we have learned working with hundreds of other organizations that use OKRs. We will share kind of a quick overview of OKRs, what are OKRs, Many of you are familiar with this concept, so it'll be a quick overview. We'll also share what an organization like yours should expect to gain, particularly in this environment, by using OKRs, and also how the effects of using OKRs extends beyond this current stage we are in. As the economy recovers, how this becomes a sustainable advantage for your organization. The third thing we'll touch upon is what are the common pitfalls. OKRs is a simple model, but There are a common set of issues we see organizations running into when they try to use OKRs. We'll touch upon that and we'll wrap it up with some clear steps on how to get started on this journey. Jess, do you want to actually share kind of a quick overview of OKRs?

Yeah, I'd love to. Thanks, Vetri. So as Vetri said, many of you might know what OKRs are, but just to give a quick high level, in short, OKRs are what are known as objectives and key results. They're a popular goal-setting framework that essentially uses metrics to drive clarity around two important questions for a business. The first one is, where do I want to go? And the second one is, how do I know that I got there? These questions are defined in a measurable way so that at the end of the OKR period, it's very clear if the company, team, or individual achieved these goals. And when we think about the makeup of the OKR program, we should think about it in two parts. First, as a methodology for setting measurable outcome-based goals that align the work every team and person is doing, and then also as a framework or a series of best practices and rules that aid companies in successfully managing those goals within the daily, weekly, and monthly rhythm of the business. When we develop OKRs, we do it in a hierarchy using a mix of both top-down and bottom-up planning to ensure that every goal is properly aligned both vertically and horizontally across the organization. This means we first start by establishing company-level OKRs. Those are then aligned to team-level OKRs, and then those are further aligned to individual OKRs. The simple methodology of cascading goals ensures that every team and individual in the company is working together to achieve the strategic priorities of the business. So with that, let's take a look at what companies are actually using OKRs today. So here's just a brief sample of some recognizable brands. One I want to share is this quote from Google co-founder Larry Page, who has quoted that OKRs have helped Google lead 10x growth many times over, and that it was actually OKRs that helped them achieve their crazy mission of organizing the world's information, and then also that it helps keep their teams on track many times over. And I think this is a really powerful statement when we think about that Google started using OKRs back in 1999, long before they became the big giant company that we know today. So it really speaks volumes to, you know, the power of OKRs. That being said, you know, Vetri, can you share some examples of what organizations can gain by using OKRs?

Thanks, Jess. Yes, actually what we commonly see— I mean, there are numerous benefits of using this methodology, particularly in a time like now. What we commonly see are 3 big things. First is OKRs actually enable the organization to gain visibility at every level of business, right? OKRs enable organizations, whether it's a team, department, or the company, to react very quickly and manage the risk proactively. Particularly when OKRs are connected, they're not standalone things you write and forget, but they're connected to the work your team is doing on an ongoing basis, connected to your CRM system, connected to your marketing automation systems or your project management systems, you get near real-time visibility into what's going on. So you're no longer flying blind and you can be very proactive and can make course corrections before it's too late, particularly in this fluid situation. That is one of the biggest benefits we have seen, having the visibility for leading the organization the right way in a time like this. The second one we have commonly seen is engagement. How do you help your employees, your team members, understand the big picture? I've read this story somewhere, um, in one of the books. It's a story about 3 workers who are laying bricks, right? And the tourist walks up to them and says, what are you guys doing? And the first person replies, hey, can you not see I'm laying bricks? And the second person replies, I'm building a wall. And the third person replies, I'm building a cathedral. You want your team members to always know that they are building the cathedral and they're moving the needle, they're having an impact every day. That big picture view, helping people to understand, give, bring purpose to their work, not just they come to work and work on tasks and projects, but there's real purpose to work and they're helping to achieve these really amazing things. And they're building the cathedral every day makes a very big difference. Particularly when they're sitting at home and working alone. The third thing we have seen is OKRs bring focus. But Jess, I'll— do you want to talk about that?

Absolutely. So I have 3 kids, and, you know, before COVID I was going to the office and I was spending 4 hours a day commuting. And now, you know, everything shifted and I'm working from home. And so I'm not working the hours that I used to work. But what I found is OKRs have actually enabled me to be a lot more productive, right? So I always know what I'm— what I need to be working on. I always know where to focus my time and being remote and not having to work within the confines of a 9 to 5 job. I can work around my schedule, but at the same time I'm still achieving everything that I need to. So it actually lends itself to a really nice work-life balance and being able to juggle the craziness that we're all dealing with here. So, you know, from an individual perspective, I think that, you know, It really does drive impeccable focus. So with that, Avatchi, what about some of the challenges that we see some of these companies face?

Oh, certainly, yes. And just before I move to this one, I should say I think you're even more productive than before. You should work from home more. On the challenges, OKR is a very, very simple concept. It's a very simple framework. The reason we see a lot of organizations adopting that framework is because of the simplicity. There is magic in that simplicity. But there are a few common pitfalls, struggles we see most organizations have, irrespective of where they are in the OKR maturity spectrum. The first one starts with actually the first stage, writing good OKRs, right? And we have seen this problem in both the two ends of the spectrum. On one side, we have seen teams not taking enough time to write the OKRs. They essentially take what they were doing before. Yes, we were working on 12 things last quarter. We're going to write them the same way we wrote it, and we're going to do 12 things this quarter as well, just that we call them OKRs. Taking the time to really understand the OKR framework and using that to focus and using that to bring clarity, right, on what are the 3 to 5 things that really matter, right? And how do I really measure success? Not write goals in this really vague ways but in a real crisp way. It takes a little effort. It's not super hard, but it takes a little bit of effort. But we see organizations often trying to rush through the process, and that does not pay off well. On the other end of the spectrum, sometimes, not commonly though, we have seen organizations taking way too much time writing these. This happens for organizations that are adopting OKRs for the first time, and they are trying to perfect these at the very first go, right? And it sometimes takes them weeks to actually finish writing these, reviewing them, and publishing them, and you're already 3-4 weeks into the quarter, and that is also not terribly helpful. What we recommend is a balanced approach, being thoughtful about it but still finishing the process in less than a week or two. And if you're first time doing OKRs, it's okay to get going. It's okay to get to even 80% accuracy in writing your OKRs as well because it still pays off big time. And as time goes by, the team becomes more and more proficient in writing great OKRs. Once you finish writing OKRs, then we see organizations struggling with the second problem, which is how do you make this part of your regular cadence? How do you— what sometimes happens is teams and individuals put in the effort of crafting great OKRs, but they set them aside. They just go back to how they were doing things before, right? They go through this beautiful exercise, have this amazing clarity, But after that, they just revert back to how they were doing things. OKRs should be right and center of what your team does every day, every week, right? It has to be brought into where your team is doing their work. It should not be on the side. If your team is collaborating in Slack or Microsoft Teams or any other environment, OKRs need to be brought into that environment where it is guiding their work on a teamly, timely basis, whether it's daily, weekly, or monthly. Your team should be using this regularly to see where things stand, what needs to change, review and prioritize ongoing work. So making this not part of the business rhythm, kind of, even if you write beautiful OKRs, seems to often come in the way of them adopting it very well. The third one we have seen is actually doing OKRs often only at the company level, right? Trying to do OKRs only for the top level, whereas top level is department or the enterprise. You do it only at that level. And the downside of this is typically the people who are further down in the organization are the ones who don't understand why they are doing what they are doing. The people at the top usually understand the strategy and how it's connected to execution pretty well. And the bigger benefit is to people further down. And huge part of the OKR benefit is not realized by limiting the usage of OKR only to the company goals or the department goals. We think the value multiplies the further you take down in the organization. It has to be done carefully, not all in one shot, in a phased manner, but it should be taken further down, as far down as possible, ideally down to the individual's owning OKRs. The fourth problem we have seen is connecting OKRs sometimes too closely to individual performance management, right? The individual's performance for comp and bonus. Some of the principles of OKRs, like setting stretch goals to improve business performance, right? You set a stretch goal, it actually pushes teams and individuals to perform better. They don't really align very well. So they need to, we need to think carefully about how a stretch goal aligns to the performance management process. If the OKR score of OKRs directly used as individual's performance score, then people likely stop setting stretch goals, will stop taking risks, which kind of hurt the business in the end. So using OKRs as just one component or one input into the individual performance process, but keeping these two a bit separate seems to work for many of the organizations we work with. There are multiple ways to make this happen, but trying to put some distance allows the organization to use OKRs very well for the business performance but still use it effectively in the context of individual's performance feedback. The last thing we see regularly is the lack of proper change management. OKRs are very simple concept, right? But it is still a change for how the organization is currently working. Your organization has been working in this current model for months and years, right? And change is not very, very easy, right? Any change, even simple, it's not easy. It is a very worthy change. It pays off big time. We have seen it repeatedly, but it's a change and takes some persistence to get it right. You, the organization, the team should— will see immediate big benefits in terms of transparency, focus, and alignment. But to build that muscle, to learn how to write better OKRs, how to follow the cadence, how to actually do proper OKR reviews, it takes couple of quarters, couple of cycles of doing OKRs to get it right, to build the muscle. And what we have seen is teams that are just dabbling and give up, unfortunately made some investment and didn't get any payoff. But teams that were a little bit more persistent, try this at least for 2 cycles, often are able to master it and become really successful. There are again a lot of other issues, but we commonly see as companies start using OKRs, these are the 5 common struggles. That they have.

Awesome. So what's the best way for somebody to get started if they want to try using OKRs?

Ah, yes. So what we recommend is taking a phased approach. Start with the top-level company objectives. Start by writing 3 to 5 company-level objectives and then take kind of a phased approach. We don't— we are not seeing organizations rolling it out in very quick succession, day after day, to the entire company work very, very well, right? What we have seen work very well is taking a phased approach. Start with the top, maybe the first 3 levels of management. If it's a department, first 3 levels of the department, or if it's enterprise, the first 3 levels of their management, right? It's from C-suite on. Have them define the OKRs for that level, but have everyone else in the organization observe it for transparency but also for learning. They understand how the leaders are doing OKRs and they learn. And in the next cycle or the next phase, take the OKRs from the enterprise level down to the team level. Have team-level objectives but not yet individual objectives. And the next phase, take it down to the individual objectives. In every phase, what happens is everyone else is still observing what my team is doing. They're benefiting from the transparency and they're learning how to do OKRs. So you do see immediate benefits, but a phased approach also enables people to understand the methodology and adopt it more effectively and more quickly. The third thing we would suggest is bring OKRs into the daily workflow. We talked about one of the pitfalls is people write OKRs and forget about it, right? We have to reduce the friction of your team adopting OKRs and bring it into where people are doing work. Do not force them to make yet another context switch, go to yet another app, to look at how their OKRs are, what they should be working on. Bring it into where they're doing their work, whether it's Outlook, Slack, Microsoft Teams, bring it to where they are doing the work and reduce the friction of OKRs by connecting your OKRs to where people are doing the work. If your team is already working in Jira, connect your OKR to Jira. Say team is already working in Smartsheet, connect the OKR to what the work they're doing in Smartsheet or whichever system they're using or HubSpot. Asking people to do double data entry creates friction. So connect the OKRs to where work happens and bring it to where they are doing their work every day. The fourth thing, fourth step in getting started is make sure a champion is assigned. Yes, the process is simple, but again, this is still a change. Not everyone will love it right from day one, but we know everyone benefits from it. And certainly the business benefits from it. We have to make sure there's a champion who's corralling the— and making sure the team— and making sure that the process is being followed. They are the ones who are actually educating the team. They are providing help. They are the ones defining the cadence, getting the meeting scheduled. Initially, this kind of effort is needed to get the process going. After some time, it becomes muscle memory. You don't have to do it. But initially, the executive sponsorship and having a champion dedicated towards making this process work seems to go a very long way in getting started. And the last one is make sure that you follow the end of the quarter or whichever cycle you're working in. Could be end of the year, end of month if you're doing monthly OKRs. Do take the time to reflect and create progress. You're not getting progress just on OKRs, which is a must-do, but also reflect on how your team is using the process, what is working for them and what is not working. And improve the process every cycle.

Awesome. That's fantastic. I believe we have some extra time, so I think we have time to take some questions. Yeah, you guys have a few questions that have come in.

So somebody wants to know, how does a small company onboard teams better remotely, especially now in the time of COVID Got it.

What— just like everyone else, we have been working in that mode for quite some time now. We are in Seattle, right, and we started locking down a bit earlier than many others. What we have found to be helpful is some of this we got fortunate, lucky, because we've been using Workcast for some time. We already have this process when a new person comes in, We have a process by which we actually bring them into the system. We have our new employee orientation, which now happens remotely, but soon after that, we onboard them into Ally. We use OKRs internally, and we actually get them going with our initial template of what a new employee gets to do at Ally. And that process actually has been kind of consistent whether we do it in person or we do it remotely.

Yeah, that's good advice. We've heard that a lot today as well from everyone. It's just like being super consistent, over-communicating to like your internal team and then like your customers where you need to. Are you guys comfortable with this question? It's, do you have some samples you can share of OKRs that you guys use internally at Ally?

We would be happy to. We Ally actually, we do share a lot of samples with customers. We have learned a lot from working with hundreds of organizations, so we have a huge template library, but a lot of our own OKRs look like OKRs of companies in our stage. It's nothing special there. We'd be happy to share.

Awesome. Okay. I'll make sure everybody can get those after. And then one last question. Can you share any business challenges that you might have overcome when you were first starting out with Ally?

Um, there were several, right? Starting a company is never easy, and this is the second time I've done it personally, but it's never easy. Um, we had a lot of unknowns, to be honest. The biggest challenge we had where we had a lot of unknowns, we didn't know whether this concept would resonate with companies of all sizes. We are targeting the enterprise, smaller enterprises to start with. It's more like startups in Series B, C stages. And what we saw early on was the product and the methodology was getting traction across the board in multiple industries and in multiple different sizes of organizations, various sizes of organizations. Adapting very quickly to kind of this broad need was one of the big challenges we had. On one hand, you want to actually be completely self-serve. On the other hand, we wanted to actually go and be core strategic partners with these very large organizations. That have made a bet on Ally and OKRs and helped them become successful. Trying to stretch in both ways was a huge challenge for us. It's a challenge for anyone, but particularly early on starting. We are very fortunate though that we had that experience. Now we feel like we understand the breadth of usage of OKRs across multiple industries, but it was a very, very tough challenge early on.

Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you for sharing that. Thank you for ending this track strong today on SaaS Care Summit.

Thanks for hanging in there with us.

If you guys have any more questions, you know, feel free to— we'll send the rest of the questions to the Ally team and we'll make sure we get them to them. But thank you so much, Jess and Vetri, for joining us today and sharing your insights with the SAS community.

Thanks for the opportunity. Thank you.

Thanks, everyone.