95% of Employees Don’t Understand How Their Day to Day Job Relates to the Company’s Strategy Transcript

Ross Martin:

Yeah, so bring it back to the topic again. The reality is, as you said at the very beginning, the time to start thinking about when to re-evaluate your strategy management process is today. As soon as possible. Exactly. There's a lot to think about and you really shouldn't take, maybe you can take a week or two off for the holidays and pick it up right in the new year. So our last topic is from another Harvard Business Review article that we were reading that says that 95% of a company's employees don't understand how their day-to-day job is related to the company's strategy.

Idris Manley:

Like, what? It's unbelievable.

Ross Martin:

I'm not surprised, but that's... How often do you come across statistics that are that high anyway? 95% of anything, right? It's always lower than that. Yeah, it's pretty unanimous. Yeah, but that's crazy because, but the executives have, they go through change, or communications at least, about the strategy. So why the hell would that be the case?

Idris Manley:

Yeah, I think one of the big issues is executives tend to plan Well, they tend to communicate their plans in their own language, right? And so there's this notion of being able to localize or to attempt to localize your annual plans and strategies for all of the different departments and organizations that are impacted by them or need to engage in them. And oftentimes I think they miss that step. Like, how do I translate that annual revenue target or translate that that efficiency goal into a way that is applicable to each team member, each team, each department, each organization? And I think oftentimes they just assume or expect the teams to do that, to make that translation, as opposed to helping provide a framework to facilitate or to help review and help analyze and make sure that they are translating in a way that maintains alignment with the original purpose.

Ross Martin:

Yeah, I think, you know, employees, you know, I think in general, employees are smart people, right? So I think when the strategy is unveiled and presented and in all hands, it's not that they don't understand what's being said to them. But unless the strategy, I think, is something that affects them greatly, like if they're in the Asia-Pac region and there's going to be a big push to expand Asia-Pac sales and they're a salesperson, well, they're going to know about that. And that's going to impact their lives. And they'll be part of all that and everything. But the people over in the US are going to say, oh, OK. And so quickly forget it and not necessarily think about how what they do tomorrow affects the strategy, I think. So I agree with you. I think it's apparent on senior management and then middle management and all the way down to translate it into what it means for individual teams and individuals.

Idris Manley:

Yeah, yeah. And that's where MBOs and OKRs come in, right? Mentors are providing a framework for being able to actually have those conversations and to perform that work. And when done right, they can be very powerful assets to ensuring cross-group alignment and visibility and accountability towards the metrics and key results that are critical, and then to essentially roll up back to the overall objectives that have been defined. But without that, it can be very difficult to expect teams to really understand. And I've seen in countless companies that I have supported, where when it's not done properly, there's a lot of prioritization conflicts, you have different departments that are working on different things and different priorities, and it's just people are not, we're sort of rowing in the same way at the same time, and it can create a significant impact on outcomes, unfortunately.

Ross Martin:

Well, and also when I've seen it not done correctly, I'm thinking of a company I was at where the goals that everyone needed to fill out into the HRIS system were seen because of that as something that HR was making them do. Yeah. And you wrote your goals using the smart process so that they were measurable and specific and all those sorts of things, presenting that, presented them to your boss. The boss said, okay, and then you pasted them into the tool and then you were done. And at the end- You didn't see them again until a year later. Exactly. At the end of the cycle, you go back, you look at it with your boss, and then you explain why three quarters of them didn't really apply anymore. Because everything changed along the way and you forgot to update them. Sure. So I think I think If you're going to do this, then what you do need is something like OKRs or MBOs, but like you said, really actually brought into the organization as an entire process and function of how we keep track of how we're doing against the business objectives all along the way. It's part of the living and breathing fabric of how your organization operates.

Idris Manley:

And I think, just to add, I think a lot of companies, they tend to ask or expect, you know, human resources or people ops to be responsible for oversight into those individual and department sort of objectives. And I think it's important that it's a shared responsibility. I think whether it's the COO or PMO, I think you need to be able to partner with HR. So it's not looked at as just a way of evaluating individuals in terms of their success, but it's really used as a tool to encourage conversations, to provide transparency in ways of inspecting and adapting, and not just as a way of holding people accountable. And so if it's all sort of managed through people operations or HR, it tends to be managed in a way that it's just you know, a quarterly or annual review to see how people performed and to inform their, their compensation, et cetera, as opposed to really encouraging, inspiring people to look at it as a means of continuing to really add value and improve what they're, how they're contributing to help the company achieve. Right.

Ross Martin:

It becomes about the people, like you, you as an individual, how you're performing. as opposed to delivering the business outcomes, right? The funny thing also about this sort of thing is when you go about it that way, and especially if it comes through the people function, then ironically, the thing that maybe the senior executives were hoping would help drive the strategy down through the organization so people understood how to contribute to the strategy, instead becomes that the definition of success for implementing all that becomes that you completed your goal input into the tool and that you have a checkbox that you did it. And the original business purpose that was envisioned for doing it in the first place is lost along the way.

Idris Manley:

Absolutely. You can certainly get lost in the bureaucracy of it. And so it's really important to look at it as an operational function, right? Where it's not something that you just start with and end the year with, but it's something that you're continuing to review. You have governance and communications that keeps it sort of visible. And you have practices where people are working together to review and determine how they're performing and if they need to adapt. you know, strategy does change, you know, mid-year at times. And so being able to recognize when changes, external or internal, which have affected strategy and it's time for different groups to adjust and recalibrate. And so having, again, having those structures in place so that that can happen and so that people can continue to stay as adaptive as the external market forces may require the company to.

Ross Martin:

One of the things I've seen that's actually been pretty successful in implementing, in this case, OKRs at a company, is they actually pulled a senior executive out of his day job to lead this. And that person reported to the CEO. So it wasn't an HR function or some other, it wasn't seen as part of that. It was an independent person with a small team of people, of coaches and things, who also were pulled, a number of A players pulled from different parts of the organization. And their job was to not only teach everybody how to do this, but to evangelize it and help and coach Everyone along the way because you can have some early adopters. You're gonna have some laggards and and so the idea is where it has failed in the past is when you ask HR or some other function to just kind of do it and And in this case, you dedicate the resources necessary. And in this case, also tool that they used that really made it so that it took. And of course, the senior executives showing everyone else doing it themselves and and constantly, you know, reinforcing that.

Idris Manley:

Yeah, and you can tell I think quite quickly if it quote-unquote took Yeah by if it's you know is the are the OKRs or the MVOs are they being performed in a push or a pull sort of environment like are people Performing the OKRs because they're being told they're being given deadlines and so they're being sort of forced, you know with the stick to actually get engaged with that process? Or are they excited and motivated and inspired to update and to collaborate and to work with other people in order to make sure that the right information is being tracked and they're working with the right people to support it. And it makes all the difference in the world if people are being inspired and motivated. to be able to contribute or if they're being forced and required to. And I think being able to sort of supplement HR's sort of role in that process with other individuals that are being mindful of these benefits and the value, I think will go a long way with helping people really start to become more motivated to support the process.

Ross Martin:

Exactly. And back to a comment that you made earlier about data, measuring this right along the way. I think at the beginning, of course, it's all push or, you know, it's all pull. You're trying to force people to do something that they're not sure they want to do. And you only have a few early adopters and who are excited about this, or maybe people that did it at another company. over time, you want to try and track and see how it's taking. And also that the way people speak in meetings and the way people speak in decisioning and strategy sessions and stuff, if they start to use the language, if it becomes clear that as something shifts, that people go in and edit and change their objectives to right then and there, instead of waiting to be told by some function like HR, it's time to do your quarterly update, that sort of thing. So yeah, it's a, it's a, it, that should really, I think, help a lot with, uh, with the 95%, uh, issue around people don't know what the heck's going on and why they're doing it.

Idris Manley:

Yeah. It should make a bit of an impact. I would think.

Ross Martin:

Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, thank you very much for joining us today. Uh, with our, again, our inaugural episode of future of work 2.0. Uh, we really appreciate your joining us.

Idris Manley:

Yep. We look forward to you joining us on future episodes.

Ross Martin:

Take care.