Customer Experience Superheroes - Series 12 Episode 3 - Goal Setting in CXManagement - Sophie Hedestad

In the latest episode of the CX Superheroes, Christopher Brooks, host and MD of Lexden CX speaks with Sophie Hedestad, founder of NOQX.

We came across Sophie in an article on the power of OKRs in customer experience, and wanted to learn more. In this episode we get to understand what OKR (Objective and Key Results) are, and why they are becoming more important than KPIs for progressive companies to manage performance.

Sophie shares the value of OKRs, and explains how they can help organisations meaningfully track progress and localise where more attention is needed.  In discussion, we understand how organisation and structure are needed to optimise OKR's and Sophie introduces us to a technology solution which NOQX have been developing t simplify the management within large (and smaller) organisations.

Is this podcast for you?
If you've not heard of OKR's this podcast is for you.
If you've heard of OKR's but are still wondering if they are right for your business, this podcast is for you.   
If you are using OKR's and want to understand how to systemise the management, this podcast is for you. 
In fact, anyone will get value so take a listen. 

In the podcast, you will hear mentioned Sophie's free e-book on OKRs. So take a look https://noqx.io/category/ebooks/.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:16

Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the CX Superheroes Podcast. My name is Christopher Brooks, and I'm your host for this series. A series in which we meet up with some of the more interesting characters in the world of customer experience. Individuals who are going to inspire us, share their insights and their ideas to help us understand how we can take customer experience to the next level. My guest today has been a simple joy to talk to. Sophie Hedastart is a specialist in objective and key result setting, goal setting, helping organizations ensure that they follow a path which can help the organization achieve its vision. I caught up with Sophie to understand just how this topic is prevalent in progressive organizations, the challenges they have in order of moving from KPIs to OKRs, and the ways in which you can ease that process and make it a more systemized and simple approach to goal setting. Okay, so today we've got a really special guest all the way from Stockholm. Now I'm going to just call you Sophie. We've spoken a couple of times, but your surname is pretty unpronounceable for me here in England. So please could you help me not embarrass myself and just pronounce your surname for me, Sophie?

SPEAKER_00 1:48

Of course. I'm really happy to join the podcast as well. And my surname is here the Stad. It's a very Scandinavian name. So I understand that it's not 100% easy for you to pronounce it.

SPEAKER_01 2:01

And look and looking how it's spelled, I'm glad that I didn't embarrass myself and I got used to pronounce it. Well, Sophie, we we met on LinkedIn, as many people do these days in business, and actually there was an article about OKRs, which were something that we'd started to look at within Lexton, and then saw your comment on it. Clearly, you understood the topic. And then when we engaged, not only do you understand the topic, you're a bit of an expert in this space, and it's actually your work. So was really delighted then because it's something I think in customer experience, we're always curious, we're always trying to find a better way to achieve our outcomes. And sometimes something as simple as goal setting can kind of slat us down. So really looking forward to talking to you about that topic and hearing how you and your organization have developed some real capability in this space. But before we get there, you're probably familiar to a lot of people in Sweden in the world of experience and design, maybe some in Europe, but fortunately we go global. So it'll be really good to hear your journey, kind of where you you are now, but also how you kind of got there. So could you start by just giving us an appreciation of who you are and what you're up to at the moment?

SPEAKER_00 3:15

Yes, of course. So I'm Sophie Hiedestad, as I just mentioned. I am born and raised in Sweden and I live in Stockholm since 2011. And uh before I studied at Lund University, south of Sweden, and I studied business administration. And when I was done with my studies, I applied for different jobs, of course, and I ended up as an international management trainee at Meltwater. And Meltwater is a software as a service company, SAS company. It's a global company, have its headquarters in San Francisco. It's about, yeah, when I started, we were about 800 employees, and when I left, we were about 2,000 employees. So I was there for many years, and I had different commercial roles. So it started out with this management trainee, but it was really about sales, I would say. So it was selling this uh software, so it was about prospecting the right personas and uh idle customer profiles, it was about uh calling these people up, booking meetings with them, having demos. Often we had the demos online, and it was selling the software we were offering and onboarding customers, making sure they were really happy uh with what they bought. And then I was in the new acquisition department, so it was starting all over again. So every month we had sales quotas, so it was uh good education in sales, I would say. I was uh in sales for five years and I was leading the sales organization at Meltwater for a couple of years, and then I moved over to marketing, so uh I got the opportunity to build up the marketing team in the Nordics at Meltwater at the time, and I did that for four or five years as well. And when I've been at Meltwater for nine years, I changed into a CMO position at Netigate, so chief marketing officer at another sauce company. Uh, Netigate was slightly smaller. We were about uh 100 people when I started, and 150 when I left this spring. And then I was leading the marketing team, and I was part of the management team driving the company's agenda, of course. We were aiming for growth excellence, let's say. So it was a great and fun journey as well. And when I was sitting in the management team at the Netigate, I was also responsible for the OKR process, the objective and key results process, like the goal setting of the company. And it's a bit rare that the CMO handle this process. I would say that most often it would be maybe HR or CFO, or if a company would have a COO, chief operating officer or a strategy officer, that would be more common, I would say. But I was leading this process, and uh, while I was doing so, I got really interested in the framework OKRs. And it's really about getting everyone streamlined to work towards the ultimate goal, the vision in the end. So, how would you do that efficiently in an organization? It was really interesting for me to dig into and to understand. And while I was doing this, I was also researching software tools, how you can get the company onboarded into a tool where you would set goals on company level, team level, individual level, and get everyone aligned to to streamline an organization and to work towards the goals in the end. And I realized there was no such tool that would excite everyone in the organization I was at. So I got an idea back then that I was uh marinating for quite some time. And during the spring, I decided to uh to build this software, this OKR or goal setting platform, let's say, that really engages the employees. So it's a performance platform that we are building where you can set goals, visualize goals, you can work towards goals, you can collaborate towards your goals. Uh so it's really about uh getting employees exciting, excited about goals and including them in the process so you can ultimately achieve your growth targets that you want to achieve.

SPEAKER_01 7:41

Brilliant. That that was a long journey. I mean, it's uh what's really wonderful about your journey, and and when we spoke before, I love this, is that actually there is a there's a structure to it. You're clearly curious about topics, and and when you find something of interest, you don't just do it on the side of the desk, you you dive into it and you you get really immersed in it. And I guess it was serendipity that you moved from one organization to another and then became in charge of the OKR program. That you've then gone, I like this, but you know, the idea that it could be so much better. So tell me, when you were working atigo, what what were some of the challenges you were finding with the uh kind of objectives and key result program?

SPEAKER_00 8:22

So I think in any organization, what is really difficult with goal setting is uh that it becomes really complex. So let's start with just uh the different time frames. So the vision would be the ultimate goal for the company. And I mean, a vision could be a 10-year horizon, something you will never achieve, that should create excitement for the stakeholders. And then you have maybe strategy, like how will we get to this vision? You would have maybe a yearly plan. That yearly plan will be uh divided down to uh half year, a quarter, a month, uh, a weekly plan, a daily plan for employees. So it's so many time horizons that a company works with. And I mean, on a company level, you would typically work with the vision that is 10 years and maybe down to a quarter, because you would summarize the quarter or the month at least at the company level. But then for individual, it has a team it belongs to as well, and that team has goals, and then your individual yourself with certain responsibilities, you would have individual goals as well. And here it becomes messy because if you let's say you have three company goals, you have three team goals, and you belong to one project team or a task for team, a task force team, and that has three goals, and then you're on an individual have individual level has three goals as well. It's 12 goals already there, so they are complex from the beginning, but uh to make this simple and graspable uh for custom for employees is really important when it comes to goal setting. So I think that is one problem. All the three layers, company T me, and then the time horizons, that it there are so many goals, and it can get quite confusing actually. And then what companies do is that they document these goals in Dropbox, SharePoint, wherever you have your goals, and it's documented in Excel PowerPoint word files, and this is also bringing like a cognitive overload for employees. You get stressed, you don't understand what's expected of yourself, of your team. So it can create a lot of stress for individuals as well. Uh the goal setting.

SPEAKER_01 10:41

So, I mean, I'm just wondering from your interactions with employees and colleagues, could you sense that it was creating kind of the word used is confusion in terms of what is it you want me to do? Because I would imagine individual team and company goals, as much as we'd want them to be beautifully aligned, if you've got a thousand employees or a hundred employees working across several teams, there's going to be some disconnect, there's going to be some overlap, there's going to be some conflict in those goals that have been set. Because I would imagine team leaders are setting them for individuals and the board is setting them for the team leaders if it's a small enough organization. And as it gets bigger, it's even more layers that are setting it. And and I mean, I've worked in organizations where I've run a function before, and I remember I wasn't given any coaching or training in terms of how to do these to make sure they were proportionate and aligned and they were positively motivating. It was just set the goals for your team. I mean, so in the conversations you've had with employees and colleagues, do you get that sense that it can be actually quite limiting in terms of productivity because you are unsure of what's really expected of you?

SPEAKER_00 11:58

At the same time, I'm thinking about the alternatives. If you don't have goal like steering your organization or governance of your organization, I'm thinking about the alternative. The alternative would then be that individuals and team set up different KPIs, and in the end, you will not like working towards your company goals in the end. So I think I agree with you, like OKRs and goal setting, it can be very complex, but at the same time, a company needs to have like a direction for their employees, like our goals. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:35

I think my point was that as someone who's been in that position where I've been setting goals before revision, I don't remember being trained or coached or working collaboratively with my other function heads to make sure we had good alignment on our goal settings. So I'm thinking back now that probably individuals were a little confused about what was actually uh wanted from them. And I guess this is where I'm coming to is that do we overlook the importance of really qualifying our leaders in setting goals?

SPEAKER_00 13:11

I think it's about the process, then maybe. So there is no process.

SPEAKER_02 13:16

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 13:17

That'd be the answer because I think if you set goals on the company level, and then you need to, of course, have some kind of point of view on the top what you want to achieve. But I think it could be quite broad still, like you want uh sustainable growth, and you might want to enter your business in a certain market. There are some like focus areas or movement areas you want to achieve, but then I think you should include the teams and the individuals, and there it's a process that is needed. Like I need these goals from you at that date in this format, uh, but it's up to you to include your team in setting these goals because if you're not included to set the goals, we will not achieve them, anyways. So I think it's more about the process than to have a clear process of how to kind of gather all the goals in the top management to have that process in a very clear way for the leaders to follow, and also to hand out templates and inform and inspire about the goal setting framework and how you will do it together. And I think it's about consistency as well. So I think if you give it one quarter, you will not end up in a perfect goal setting. If you give it two quarters, that would be the same. So I think keep it really simple in the beginning and then iterate and refine the process over time. So I think here's actually valuable that the management team is there long term because in growth companies, sometimes I mean management uh can come and go a little bit. So I think it's a good thing that someone can own this a bit more long-term, iterate it and refine it over time. And I think you will onboard new colleagues in a much better structure.

SPEAKER_01 15:08

And and I guess it would be very helpful, wouldn't it, if you're able to analyse how successful approaches to goal setting have been. So, in in, you know, if you're able to look and see that the way we've managed this particular set of goal setting, the way that we've designed the process, the types of goals we're giving our employees to deliver have been very successful. It would be great to have that as kind of a blueprint to be able to take forward. But I'd imagine just it is, as you say, stuff's kept in Dropbox, in SharePoint, it's kept on people's desks, it's stuck on the wall in terms of if I wake up and I do nothing more but my three individual goals, I'm doing a good job. Systemizing it is a nightmare. But you know, this is a challenge you've been looking at, isn't it? How do you systemize it, simplify it, and create data for businesses to better goal set?

SPEAKER_00 15:59

So that's exactly what we're doing at NOx. So we're building this platform to create clarity and enable execution for employees. But I mean, I'm not here to talk about NOx and the platform, but uh I mean that's uh premise of simplification and systemization.

SPEAKER_01 16:15

I mean, it's something that would resonate with a lot of people who are responsible for setting goals and for also for achieving those goals. So give give us an appreciation of the benefits of systemizing goal setting.

SPEAKER_00 16:28

I think you would get clarity and enable execution, and it's the execution in the end that will drive the growth for the company. It's not more PowerPoint slides, Excel sheets, and like confusion that will get the growth goals in the end. It is that you want all the employees to be like oiled machinery. Everyone knows what they do, what they're responsible for, and it will create excitements at the individual level as well because they know what's expected of them. They know what success looks like for themselves in their roles. So I think if you systemize it and create a process, and maybe you would have one person that would work really hard with this process and follow up and make sure everyone is following it. But what you will get in the end is an oil machinery where everyone knows what to do to achieve their goals in the end. So I think it would be very powerful to for companies to take the next step when it comes to goal setting. I think if you look at CRM tools 10 years ago, companies had their most important and valuable customers in an Excel sheet. Today we have goals in Excel sheets. So we're treating like the most precious things for the company in an Excel sheet, and that's how we handled CRM, or that's the objections we had buying a CRM tool 10 years ago. So I think there is actually a lot of steps forward we can do in this area. And I know goal setting leadership, I mean, it's been discussed for 80 years now, but um companies are still not streamlined when it comes to goal setting and making this like an efficient machinery that I think uh I mean, I I don't think it would ever be 100% perfect, but I think companies can step up a lot in this area.

SPEAKER_01 18:17

So you talk about better alignment, and let's say you're on the you're in in that position where you've identified that the goal setting is a little disjointed, it does create confusion and you want to do something about it. I mean, what are the sorts of simple steps you can start to take to improve alignment in goal setting within the organization?

SPEAKER_00 18:37

So I think first of all, it starts from the top with the CEO together with the management team, that they have a joint view on where they are heading as a company and what they want to achieve as a company, because that will drill down to the other teams as well. So if uh the leadership has a different point of view on where we're heading and uh what we're gonna achieve, that's a big problem for organizations. So, I mean, it's quite obvious, but it needs to start there that they need to have a kind of joint uh vision. And then I would say that uh communicating this and including people into this is really important as well. I think employees could be a lot uh more included in this as well. So have formats like all hands meeting town halls with the whole company that is more interactive rather than informative, so you can introduce where you're going long term and include people to have a say in it. And I mean, it's a lot of combining factors, of course. You need to have like psychological safety to be able to give critical voices on this as well. But I think it's uh really important to discuss this, and you will not maybe always be aligned, but in the end, if you're gonna work full steam ahead towards a goal, you need to at least decide on this is the path ahead. And then I mean, include teams. And I think there's a really balance here, but I think let's say you are like a web site developer, and that growth is a big goal for the company, and that you will get more marketing-qualified leads to the website if you have a better page speed and uh if the page is loading fast or whatever it could be. So it's better for the website developer to set its own goal than maybe the leader of the team. So it's better for the leader of the team to say, like growth, we we need to achieve ultimate growth. And for the marketing team, that would mean marketing qualified leads. What does that mean in your role? So if you're a website developer, it's better for the website developers to say, we need to optimize our website so we can drive those lids, than to, I don't know, create a beautiful website, maybe.

SPEAKER_01 20:54

Yeah, I I get that. It's really, as you said, it's that's it's that trusting your people that they've got the skills and expertise and that they're looking at the vision and finding their way towards it. And it just made me kind of think about very early on in my working life when we were asked, we were invited to kind of set what we think we could achieve. And it was very operational, sort of how many, I think it was how many bits of data could be input or something like this, and and how many applications would be processed. And I remember setting it and being pulled to one side and told to halve my number because it would look bad on other people. If we could all achieve that, but actually we don't want to achieve that because it means we have to work hard. And and in the end, this when it went in, it the other team members had actually set their targets higher than me, so that I then felt like I was underachieving. So that psychological trust is really important, isn't it? Because there was a team who was not interested in achieving what the business wanted to achieve, and actually I clearly was more aligned to where the business was going. And therefore, rather than embrace me, it was trying to exit me. Which I kind of it was only many years later I kind of realised what was going on. But that was because of ineffective goal setting, an ineffective process, where it was used to almost scrutinize your capability rather than to recognize your strengths to contribute towards it. So I think you're right. That change needs to happen where there needs to be that psychological trust. So I can stare at the vision and work through my function and my role to recognize the contribution I make towards it. And that's a point I wanted to come on to in terms of contribution, because obviously, one of the biggest challenges with goal setting is that often the factors that define the success of the organization are outside of the control of the employees that work in it. I mean, we're going through a cost of living crisis, we've been through a supply chain crisis prior to that, we had a situation prior to that where we were immobile, we couldn't move around. Those are factors that many individuals have no control over, but would have affected the vision of the organization. So, how can effective goal setting help in terms of recognizing people's contribution?

SPEAKER_00 23:11

Yeah, I think they need uh control over their own contribution. So I think if you set up a goal for an individual that they cannot control themselves, it will be very stressful. So let's say a marketing manager, I'm saying now, I'm talking about the website developer again. So if that marketing manager is highly dependent on having a website to uh get leads in, but the the marketing manager is not the engineer, right? So it's not gonna build a website and optimize it and make sure the technical SEO is perfect, then it's highly dependent on someone else. So I mean that is more kind of a team achievement, then I would say that should be something that would be a goal that would be set on a team level. Um, so on an individual level, it should be something that this person can affect on a daily basis themselves. So for, or if you're a salesperson, you can affect numbers of booked meetings, you can affect uh number of conducted meetings, you can affect your sales numbers and how many offers you have out. But it's difficult for you to implement a CRM system. Let's say you would have that as an individual goal. So I think that is really important in terms of goal setting that the individual can actually affect it on a daily basis and also have the possibility to change it if you set the wrong goals. So you have the agility, like, okay, this was a stupid choice. We didn't have the information three months ago, but we have it now. So let's change it because it doesn't make sense any longer. So I think yeah, it's a lot of trust.

SPEAKER_01 24:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:49

Trust for teams and individuals.

SPEAKER_01 24:51

I mean, what you're reflecting there, as you said, it's about it's not only about the process, but it's the approach you take to the process. Because you're we're talking here about you need to be able to collaborate with your colleagues, you need to be able to share everything in the the spirit of progress. And there has to be some experimentation because, as you say, the action you take today may unearth some insight that means that your decision was not right and you need to change it. But unless you are comfortable that you're gonna find something that can change your direction, you won't go looking for it in the first place. So I think it's those things are really important here, isn't it? And it's and it's then ensuring that from the leader's perspective, surely the voice and their approach and the the culture is gonna have a massive impact on just how connected to the goals we are.

SPEAKER_00 25:42

Yeah, definitely. And I think also a dimension that we haven't talked about is uh quality in work. Yeah because that is really hard to quantify. Yeah, so I I don't think I mean an organization should not be stupid and quantify everything. Let's say, like a designer. That could be, of course, like getting items or uh images or videos or whatever this designing uh designer is working on to have a certain speed, but quality and work is really difficult for a designer, let's say.

SPEAKER_01 26:13

I remember working with uh an international organization and they used to be focused on what they needed to achieve. And they used to achieve the targets a lot, but they used to find that their long-term commitment from their customers was challenging. And someone in I don't remember it was HR or somewhere added into it a review from the customers on how well we get to our targets, and that was the revelation was that there was compromises in quality all over the place in order to hit the quantified targets. So I I think you're right. You you it was difficult, it was difficult to quantify the quality that was needed, but when it was missing, it became very evident that, and and I think that's a difficult balance, isn't it? Because it's not just you argued, do you want to get there and actually it's substandard, or would you rather not get there? But because you couldn't do it, it was going to be substandard, so therefore it was gonna let you weren't gonna achieve the vision, you are better not launching, which was maybe the vision is around quality, you know, the bet the best quality provider, but if your personal targets around delivering three new solutions, but actually you look at them and say none of those three meet the quality, it's having the confidence to say, where does the power base sit? Is it okay for me not to hit my targets if it knows it means I'm protecting the long-term reputation of the vision that we're going for? I mean, it must be things you've come across before and are considering all of the time. I mean, how do you balance that kind of failure is acceptable if it means that we were you know protecting the long-term interests of the organization?

SPEAKER_00 27:56

That's really a balance because a leader could say that someone is lazy and just relying on it like I didn't achieve quality work. Yeah, so it is really a balance, and then it goes back to trust, maybe like is it the right person at the right uh spot? So I think I think you should not be stupid and quantify everything because that is just ridiculous. You need some processes to just have quality in it, and if you're gonna launch three features, but all of them are bugging and are really bad, then it's maybe better to release one. And then I think uh like collectively, we as humans can be stupid. We're gonna we set up the goal to launch three features, and I think that's what the companies do sometimes, like it's huge failures because uh it wasn't quality in work. No one had uh time to check with the customers if they wanted to uh pay money for this or not. So I think this happens every day at companies that you launch shitty things because you decided to do so in the beginning of the quarter, but uh then it wasn't quality. So uh I think it's uh about culture then to stop and to say this was wrong. We thought wrong, we didn't have all the information that we needed back then. Let's make it like this instead. And that's what I think happens all the time with goal setting that you didn't have the information enough to change it. So it's really balanced as well there.

SPEAKER_01 29:25

So it is a balance. I saw uh a news article um recently about a UK train company that was now considering itself to be proactive because it was telling customers ahead of the day when their train was due to go that it was not going to be able to run, it was gonna cancel. And the reason it wasn't gonna run is because they didn't have the right number of staff to run it. And you think there's someone has had a goal to produce trains and secure train lines, and it's not connected to the goal, which is around making sure we've got people who can drive those trains. And and yet they were saying how great we are because we're telling customers don't go on the day because there'll be no trains. And I couldn't, it just felt wow, what's going on in that organization that you can align so much on what you're trying to do as a business that you make one side of the business, the whole business fails because parts of the organization are pulling in different directions because they obviously were just working to their own individual goals. Maybe they needed to do that to secure the franchise of the network, but if they've not got the people, they're not the right company for that particular requirement. So I think you're right, it's yeah, it does require a very careful balance. It brings me on to another point on this, and that is that do you think it's in the interest of the organization to like you'd have an independent health and safety officer, do you think it's advisable that organizations, when they're going through their goal setting, have someone who's independent of the organization who can avoid the confirmation bias, who can then just help them validate what the outcome will look like? And I talk about this because in a number of our podcasts, we get into things like CX design. And there's the danger of kind of I can produce this, now let me find a market, versus the CX approach, which is what's the outcome I'm trying to achieve, visualize what that will look like, and that will help them understand how I need to get there. Do you think there's value in having an independent advisor who can help the company understand what the likely outcome is going to be based on the stress and the strain of employees, but also in terms of what it delivers for customers when they're setting their goals so they can start to appreciate what the future will look like before they kind of get there? Or do you think that it should be self-governed within an organization?

SPEAKER_00 31:48

I mean like external parts coming in.

SPEAKER_01 31:50

Yeah, kind of someone who can stand apart from that organization, look at it objectively from a professional level of capability in terms of goal setting, but also be kind of one step removed from the function, from the individuals, to help them understand where does this goal, where does this goal likely to take us? Because I think sometimes, I mean, I've I did a fabulous piece of uh research with a technique called using ZMET. And what it identified is as individuals, we live in the past, present, or future. We don't live in the we we've we struggle as individuals to live in the three paradigms at the same time. So people who are more inclined to live in the past will rely on what's gone before. People who live in today will be more transactional, and people who live in the future will be more visionary in their goal setting. And actually, that if you don't have that appreciation in a team, it could be very challenging in terms of where that goes.

SPEAKER_00 32:44

So, do you think role for an independent? So I think there is not one way to roam. I think there could be different paths to success here. So it could be if you don't have the competence, the time and knowledge about how to do goal setting in your organization, and there are consultancy and softwares out there that are experts, you should bring those people in. But if you have like a chief strategy officer or chief operating officer that has handled this in many companies before, I mean, and knows the organization inside out, I think it could be in the organization as well. But maybe that uh that person would have sparring uh like an external person to uh have as a coach, let's say like there's plenty of OKR coaches out there that could coach you and guide you and um and talk to you about problems that occur. So I think there there could be different setups, but if you don't have the knowledge, time, and competence, I think you should still do it and have a solid goal setting in place and iterate it over time and maybe then bring someone externally.

SPEAKER_01 33:52

Great. So and and talking about that, so maybe a first step would be doing a bit of a bit of reading on it. Now I know you've been spending some time getting the benefit of your knowledge down into an ebook. Uh so would would this be a useful tool for someone who's thinking about the OKRs to actually get a copy of your ebook? Would that be a value?

SPEAKER_00 34:12

Yes, so yes, of course. So they can go into our website. I think you can link it as well in the episode.

SPEAKER_02 34:18

Yeah, put it into the article.

SPEAKER_00 34:20

Yeah. If you don't find it, go to n oqx.io and it will be under the knowledge hub. Uh and there you can get the copy in English, and it's about OKR, it's about 55 pages, but it's still has a lot of images in it and so on. And I think you would get a good hang of the OKR framework if you read it. And I don't think you need to uh use the OKR framework in a fixed way. You can uh pick and mix the way it suits your company, but I think you can get a good, a lot of good, valuable thoughts, like what are the differences between KPIs and OKR, let's say, and how can you use it to have like overarching goals and make teams link their goals to the company goals and individual goals to the team goals and simplify this process and so on. So I think it's a valuable read for everyone in a company, but maybe especially the management team.

SPEAKER_01 35:16

Excellent. Excellent. Well, that's a really good start. And I do want to talk a little bit about the platform that you've developed then, because obviously it may not be for someone who's day one looking at OKRs, but people who are working with OKRs at the moment will be conscious of just how complicated it can be and be looking to kind of we we try to do this with everything. We try to systemize it and simplify it. So give us an appreciation of kind of how that's looking in terms of the development of your platform.

SPEAKER_00 35:42

Yeah, so we have developed a like a fun, simple platform for goal setting. So it's very easy to understand. So when you log into the platform, you would see company team me. Company, you would have your company goals, team, you would have your team goals, individual me, you would have your me goals. So it's very clear what goals you're working towards and how you're progressing towards those goals. And there's also a lot of collaboration in our tools. So you have a lot of dependencies in teams and in individuals that they are dependent on other uh teams to achieve their goals sometimes. So it's a platform that encourages collaboration and makes sure you are executing the action towards the goals as well, well in an efficient way. So it's like a goal tool marrying a collaboration tool.

SPEAKER_01 36:32

And you say it's quite intuitive, it's quite simple, it's not going to be another software that people have got to learn. It's if goal setting, then this is quite easy to adopt.

SPEAKER_00 36:43

Yes, and I think uh the feedback from employees, why they really love it, it's because they have their to-do lists. So many employees today have their to-do lists on the phone or in a Word document, or they block a little time in their calendar. But what employees really love about our tools is that you can add your daily to-dos in the system, and you can decide yourself if you want it private only for yourself, or if you need help from someone else. So you would get a lot of collaboration because your to-do list that you have is like today a siloed island island. It's only for yourself, but in the system you can collaborate on this, achieve your goals. So it's the daily to-dos are the goals of the day, and the vision is like the 10-year horizon, as I spoke about. So we want to solve goal setting on all-time horizons. So everything from the vision to the OKRs and to the sprints, if you work in sprints, to the daily execution that you do. So the system is something you would log into daily and enjoy working with.

SPEAKER_01 37:46

Excellent. And and I guess then the ultimate is to be able to demonstrate that every single one of those is connected towards the vision. There's not nobody is doing anything within the organization that's ineffective use of time. It's all working towards the vision.

SPEAKER_00 38:00

Yes. So if you want to, you link it towards your company goals. So that's uh yeah, it's uh a way to make sure that you are streamlined and work towards the same goals in a fun, easy UX.

SPEAKER_01 38:14

Well, I love the fact that where the first word you used to describe it was fun, which you've just done again there. And that's what this uh conversation has been. So if it's been great fun, it's been really good for me to kind of just redress the balance in my early uh career to understand what I wasn't in the wrong position. But also as we embark at Lexton on OKRs to kind of get a bit of free consultation from you. So thank you very much for that. Now, if people want to get hold of your rebook, we said we'll put a link into the description uh of this podcast. But obviously, there's a lot of there's a wealth of information that you have on OKRs. And I know when we've spoken before, you've shared some really interesting case studies in terms of how long it takes to plan these out, et cetera, and and when success comes through. But also, I mean you you you just wet our appetite with the technology as well. So if people want to get hold of you, what's the best way to get hold of you and you know, arrange a demo or just speak to you? Maybe they've got some questions on the back of the ebook. How do people get hold of you?

SPEAKER_00 39:08

So if they want to talk to me directly, LinkedIn is the best platform for me. Hard to spell my name, maybe.

SPEAKER_01 39:14

Sophie here is very able to.

SPEAKER_00 39:17

I think I'm the only one uh with that name on LinkedIn. So yeah, just connect with me. Or if you want the demo straight away, I would say go into the Nox website, noqx.io, and just request a demo from there. And uh yeah, take it out. That's the way to go.

SPEAKER_01 39:33

Okay. Well, I mean, best of luck with your with you. I mean, you're you're really focused, and I really respect you for that. There's too many people these days who are kind of generalists and jumping all over the place, but your topic, clearly your topic, and you've dedicated your current working life to it, which is admirable. So I wish you all the success with it. And I'm sure many people will be interested to speak to you further on on the topic of OKR. So thank you very much for your time, Sophie.

SPEAKER_00 40:01

Thank you so much, Christopher, for having me.

SPEAKER_01 40:04

You're welcome.