With the rise in Strategic Planning and Execution Platforms built to help high growth companies more effectively align teams, communicate vision, and impact performance, strategy and operations leaders finally have a solution to implement operating frameworks that can serve as a catalyst for growth at their company.  

A solution like Elate is becoming a staple for how strategy and operations leaders think about the people, process, and solution needed to effectively connect the long-term vision of the company with tactical execution. Further, these leaders have also realized that a Strategic Planning platform doesn’t only serve their ability to gain insight into what’s going on across the organization, it can also provide a level of visibility to other team leaders that today doesn’t exist. 

While Sales Leaders may work in Salesforce, Finance Leaders in Quickbooks, and Engineering Leaders in Jira, often line of sight into other KPIs or critical information can help inform decisions for leaders that live outside of these platforms. 

Specifically, for companies that have implemented an OKR framework and Team Level OKRs, gaining visibility into the current status of cross-department initiatives that have a direct impact on your team can be invaluable. 

For Strategy and Operations leaders looking to help other department leaders understand the value of implementing a Strategic Planning platform like Elate, rather than tracking your OKR framework in an OKR spreadsheet template or an OKR tool, we wanted to share three of the most commonly referenced use cases for implementing a Strategic Planning platform across your teams. 

Team OKRs for Collaborating 

Far too often we meet with leadership teams who have turned to an operating framework, such as OKRs, EOS, 4DX or others as a way to create alignment, increase communication across teams, and help measure what matters for the business. As John Doerr’s OKR book, Measure What Matters, would insinuate, companies need to focus on what key initiatives really move the business forward. 

However, far too often OKRs or other operating frameworks fall short of truly aligning teams. Why? Well, because far too often an operating cadence or goal-setting framework is introduced in a manual, unscalable way that is never designed to grow with the company. 

At Elate, we believe that it comes down to the right people, process, and a solution to help bring your strategic planning and execution framework to life. 

As the leading Strategic Planning software built to help high growth companies communicate their vision, create alignment, and track performance all in one place, Elate was designed with intuitiveness and ease of use in mind. For many of the companies we work with, this emphasis on intuitiveness and ease of use is game-changing. 

Up until this point, most companies have used OKR excel templates, an OKR template PDF, or OKR warehouses. None of these were designed with OKR alignment or OKR collaboration in mind. 

Strategic planning software like Elate was built to solve this challenge. By providing a succinct view into all Company Objectives, Department Objectives, and Team Objectives, a strategic planning solution can easily allow team members to see how different OKRs are performing. Further, Elate’s team objective view can provide visibility into OKR dependencies across other departments. 

By identifying potential blockers, contributors, and dependencies, a solution like Elate allows members of your sales team to see how OKR examples for growth can be impacted by Product OKRs or Engineering OKRs. 

So whether you are looking to increase ACV by launching a new feature, build Customer Satisfaction through a new support channel, or even begin selling into a new market after a product launch, don’t let a lack of visibility into cross-department OKRs hold you and your team back from reaching success. 

How to Present OKRs and Run Team Meetings 

One of the other challenges we’ve seen for companies looking to effectively roll out team OKRs is providing structure and direction for how team leaders can introduce, measure, and communicate OKRs to their team members. This is often one of the most overlooked parts of rolling out OKRs across your company, and can limit one of the biggest values of an OKR framework. 

For leadership teams, it’s often fairly straightforward to introduce a method for how to present OKRs to run team meetings. An organization has a set number of Company Objectives that are often reviewed at the leadership level, and with a solution like Elate these OKRs can be automated and connected for real-time results to be reviewed by leadership. This format helps drive conversation on potential challenges or opportunities within those Objectives, and pairs subjective with objective updates. 

This cadence creates a lightweight, consistent approach to prioritizing what matters most to your business, and not getting bogged down with the minor issues that are top of mind that day.  

However, what if this same level of simplicity for prioritization could be done at the team level? 

By leveraging a Strategic Planning software like Elate, you can provide your team leaders with the same opportunity to run team meetings and create alignment with a focus on the Objectives that matter most to your business. 

With Elate’s integrations into key data sources, such as Salesforce, Jira, Quickbooks, and even Google Sheets, team members can automate how they track Key Results for their Objectives. Additionally, our integrations into Slack and Microsoft Teams makes it easy for team members to provide subjective updates to their OKRs as well. 

By streamlining how your teams track OKRs, measure OKRs, and review OKRs, managers can now have a unified view of their team level OKRs. Similarly, managers and employees can see how the OKRs at the team level roll up to the company OKRs being set by leadership, so they understand how the work they are doing contributes to overall company goals. 

This connection between company OKRs and team OKRs also helps drive accountability in the sources of data being used regularly by team members. 

For example, if your company automates how Objectives are tracked by connecting to data sources like Salesforce, then the likelihood of your team members keeping Salesforce up to date increases significantly. If team members know that the Key Results tied to their Objectives are visible across the company, then they likely will have more incentive to keep those updated. Further, if they know their Objectives are connected to other OKRs across the company, then by not updating their Key Results, they run the risk of endangering other team members' OKRs. 

For managers, running team meetings within a platform like Elate is easy. With Objectives, Key Results (KPI Scorecard), and Topics all brought together in one view, managers can review team OKRs with employees each week to ensure they are communicating company goals and creating alignment. 

Best Strategic Planning Platform for Team OKRs 

 With the rise in Strategic Planning software as a solution for high growth companies, the opportunity to turn your OKR framework and team OKRs into a competitive advantage has never been easier. 

As strategy and operations leaders take on more responsibility in building the framework for driving strategic planning and execution, it is critical that they have the right solution to bring their framework to life. 

Meet Elate. 

Elate is the leading Strategic Planning software built to help high growth companies communicate their vision, create alignment, and track performance all in one place.

If you’d like to learn more about how we are working with today’s leading high growth companies to build world-class strategic plans and operating frameworks, reach out to our team today. We’d love to share how we can help your company take strategic planning to a new level!