“Elate is where our most important strategic priorities for the year come to life and it is the single source of truth for the most important things that need to happen at our organization.”
-Margie Eggen, Chief of Staff, Seismic
Imagine a world where every move your organization makes is meticulously orchestrated, resulting in unparalleled customer engagement, empowered teams, and exponential revenue growth. This is the world that Seismic, a global leader in enablement software, tirelessly strives to create for their customers.
Despite Seismic’s success in equipping 2,000+ customer-facing teams with cutting-edge enablement solutions, they faced an internal challenge: aligning their workforce strategically.
Leadership lacked real-time updates on key initiatives, and employees grappled with understanding how their work contributed to the bigger company vision. Moreover, there was limited visibility across the organization into how departments were connected to the top priorities of the company.
Seismic had tried to solve this with OKR and performance management solutions in the past, but they struggled to gain traction and adoption. These tools could not provide a unified view of their strategy that could easily be communicated to the rest of the organization. However, with a rapidly growing team and ambitious goals, allowing teams to work in silos with disparate tools was no longer an option.
So, they set out to find a solution that would set a strong foundation for strategic direction, provide visibility into their top strategic initiatives, build alignment around those initiatives, and show employees how their work tied into the company’s vision and strategic plan.
With the previous struggle in adoption, defining an implementation and enablement plan that worked with their existing processes was critical. Seismic partnered with Elate to devise a phased rollout plan, identifying where Elate served in communicating the company strategy, and how it empowered teams across the organization.
Together, Elate and Seismic defined their operating framework, establishing a robust operating cadence that supported their strategy. They also created a Strategic Planning Playbook to communicate changes effectively and ensure widespread adoption.
Here is the phased approach Seismic took:
Phase 1: Setting the Foundation
Phase 2: Building the Plan
Phase 3: Rollout & Execution
Following the rollout, Elate brought a new focus to what the top priorities across each team were. With 100% of their Objectives aligned to an annual Company Themes, Seismic teams could now understand and even visualize the ‘why’ behind the work they were doing for the fiscal year.
A single source of truth for reporting on Objectives and Key Results was a critical aspect of Seismic’s evaluation of Elate. Previously, Seismic used spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations in meetings to share progress, but they needed a solution that created a clear cadence for reviewing OKRs.
Elate’s plug-and-play integrations with Seismic’s data sources have enabled their teams to create Scorecards for easy access to the top metrics across the business. They can also associate any of those metrics with the Objectives and connect the true Outcomes they are striving to achieve.
Across all of Seismic's Objectives within Elate, 80% of their Key Results are measured by Outcomes, meaning employees are now able to measure their impact and success on the wider business, contrary to monitoring progress of tasks and to-dos.
"I think Elate provides some gravitas to those most important initiatives that must get done because they have a home and are rooted in metrics. It raises the profile for the entire organization to be able to consume them, understand them, and work towards them," says Margie.
Today, Elate serves as Seismic’s strategic compass and a single source of truth for execution. With a connected and unified view of the strategic plan, everyone can view the company’s top strategic priorities and their associated key results.
“Everyone at the company has access to it and can see the strategic priorities that we have and the Key Results associated with each.”
The focus for any strategic plan owner should be on driving action rather than tracking down updates. By meeting teams where they already work like Slack and email, Seismic employees have provided over 3k comments on Objectives, with more than half of those directly tagging and alerting other individuals about cross-functional work.
In addition to their Objective status updates and Outcomes they are striving towards, this necessary commentary is then rolled up into their reports and has become a part of their operating rhythm. Seismic relies on Elate’s Advanced Reporting feature to automate these reports, saving hundreds of hours in manual reporting each quarter.
Yet the real power of a solution like Elate lies in the ability to directly impact execution with measurable results. Through partnership with Elate, Seismic has amplified the impact of their Strategic Planning and OKR framework by creating a clear, consistent process for building, reviewing, and taking action upon the key drivers of their business.
The results? Across the entire organization Seismic saw a 92% Objective Success Rate in FY23 on the strategic initiatives moving the business forward.
Overall, Elate has been Seismic's guiding light, providing clarity on important initiatives and facilitating their alignment with departmental goals. It serves as a platform where employees can connect their daily tasks to the broader company vision. With the entire strategic plan accessible in Elate, Seismic has fostered a shared understanding of the company's trajectory and the steps needed to reach its goals. As Margie puts it, 'Elate is our North Star, guiding us to important initiatives and helping us contextualize the work of all teams and individuals.'
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