What does a company that is already an innovator in its industry do to stay ahead?
In the quest for even better results, faster delivery times, and happier, more engaged employees, our client decided to redesign its European organisation to achieve increased alignment and focus on specific audiences and their needs. We have been working closely with them to help them break functional silos by creating and evolving capable, cross-functional teams and clearly communicate direction of travel through Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).
Their journey continues as each team is closely monitoring their performance and reflecting on how they work in their new configuration in order to improve outcomes by learning and adapting. This is what continuous participatory change is all about.
The Challenge
Our client is a medium sized Software as a Service (SaaS) innovator in the insurance industry. It was founded by a team with extensive experience to bring insurers, brokers and customers closer together through the use of technology.
The business has experienced strong growth over the last 3 years. Despite being very successful with their offerings, regular employee surveys kept pointing to a number of problems including functional silos, insufficient communication within and between teams, conflicting objectives, and lack of trust in people to do their jobs. This led to the decision to reorganise their Europe Region around specific client audiences and their needs, and to provide clarity of direction and increased focus.
The Response
With the above challenge in mind, the leadership crafted a mission: “To design a team structure that optimises the work and allows us to innovate and move fast at scale, whilst ensuring we remain a place where people love to work”. The associated outcomes were defined as even better results, faster delivery times, and happier, more engaged employees.
Cross-Functional, Capable Teams
The starting point of our engagement journey was to guide and support the Europe Region in restructuring from traditional functional teams (e.g. Sales, Marketing, Underwriting, etc.) into four cross-functional teams, each focused on a particular client journey and a well-defined subset of client needs.
The approach we suggested was to start by clearly defining each team’s area of focus - Team’s Mission - and the key skills required on the team. The next step was to let the people self-organise around those Missions based on their skills, experience and interests. This was a significant leap of faith but it paid off in increased motivation, engagement, and agency. The teams continue to maintain the overall “skills marketplace” and monitor the skills needs and coverage, identify any gaps, and work to address those.
Clarity of Direction
In order for an organisation to succeed, every employee needs to be clear about the direction of travel and aligned around key outcomes. It was decided to use Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) across the organisation to provide this clarity and achieve alignment.
Like many other management tools, OKRs are simple to understand, yet much harder to implement successfully. We worked with the leadership and each Europe team to help them understand OKRs and how to adopt them, align them across the organisation, and evolve them over time. We also tackled the sensitive topic of using OKRs and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) together, where a small number of KPIs represent a health dashboard of the business.
Continuous Participatory Change
Each team is monitoring their progress towards their OKRs and reflecting on what is propelling them forward as well as the tensions that are holding them back. They then design experiments to address identified and prioritised tensions. Every six weeks, the teams pause to reflect, learn, and adapt.
We facilitated initial Tensions and Experiments workshops for each team and will continue to do so until the teams become more self-sufficient. This is a true journey of continuous participatory change, a never-ending cycle of sensing and responding that involves every team member in every team.
IN BRIEF
IN MORE DETAIL
This is a true journey of continuous participatory change, a never-ending cycle of sensing and responding that involves every team member in every team.
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Innovate and move fast at scale, whilst remaining a place where people love to work
CASE STUDY
Organising for success
Break functional silos by creating and evolving capable, cross-functional teams and clearly communicate direction of travel