Strategic alignment is achieved when every team's OKRs are purposefully crafted to support the organisation's broader strategic goals, ensuring that departmental initiatives are focused, connected, and meaningful.
Increasing Competition in the Financial Services Industry
Strategic Alignment; the response
Due to the rapidly increasing rate of Big Tech firms and FinTech companies entering the Financial Services Industry, there is a growing need to improve an organisation's capability to compete.
Many companies are struggling to challenge the more tech-focused institutions with their product-offering because of a lack of infrastructure and not having a clear, coherent strategy aligned to process and project performance.
For this reason, Leadership Teams and Departmental Leads are seeking out new ways of articulating strategy throughout their organisation, eliminating waste and increasing accountability, in order to ensure everyone is aligned and delivering measurable value.
Naturally, this has driven business leaders to explore the use of OKRs as a means of supporting Strategic Planning.
Using OKRs to Support Strategic Alignment
Using OKRs to support strategic alignment in financial organisations not only connects strategy to process and project performance — we have also seen it work wonders for improving employee engagement measures.
In order to create value-driven OKRs, we carry out two preliminary phases that help ensure strategic alignment throughout the organisation.
Strategy Mapping
The purpose of Strategy Mapping is to identify the organisation's key strategic themes and prioritise them by how important they are to the long-term goals of the company.
We visualise these themes through four lenses:
- Financial perspective
- Customer perspective
- Internal Business Processes perspective
- Learning & Growth perspective
This forms our strategy map, which can then be used to articulate strategy throughout the organisation and translate strategy into action through the creation of our OKRs.
Metrics Workshop
KPIs
Metrics workshops help us to understand our Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and what level of performance is required to win customers in each customer segment — that is, what levels they deem acceptable or exceptional.
A KPI is something a customer cares about, and is 'key' for an organisation to deliver its mission and purpose.
Health Indicators
We also use the metrics workshop to distinguish KPIs from Health Indicators — the latter of which don't necessarily affect customers' choices, but do provide an indication of the business's vitality.
Health Indicators tell us if our business is healthy enough to pursue its strategy and can give advanced warning if we're in danger of missing our targets.
A sudden change of a Health Indicator — an upward or downward trend — should warrant the business to re-evaluate its strategy or operational processes.
Improvement Drivers
When we identify that we're under- or over-serving an area of the business, Improvement Drivers are a way to think about the change that is needed and what the outcome is that we're driving towards.
Improvement Drivers have a target value to be achieved. When the target is reached, we either deprecate the metric or change it to a Health Indicator.
Done collectively, we can view all the Improvement Drivers across the business to support prioritisation — ensuring that the most important changes are resourced and actioned first.
Strategic Alignment; OKR Creation
The findings from our Strategy Mapping and Metrics Workshop give us the inputs needed to create well-established OKRs.
Our strategy map helps us visualise the company strategy and the direction we'll take in order to achieve our long-term goals. We can also split this into strategic themes, making it much easier to prioritise the most important Objectives for the coming year.
Defining our KPIs ensures that we stay focused on customer outcomes — what we're ultimately trying to deliver — rather than internal activity that doesn't connect to value.
Additionally, once we've defined our Health Metrics (along with their thresholds), we'll have a better understanding of which Improvement Drivers will move those metrics to where we need them to be.
These Improvement Drivers then feed directly into our Key Results, and are what supports genuine strategic alignment — not just in theory, but in the OKRs that teams commit to every quarter.
Many teams and organisations struggle to conceptualise and create their OKRs because of a lack of articulated strategy, an overwhelming list of metrics, and no clear connection between the two. Strategy Mapping and Metrics Workshops solve that problem at the source — giving every team a clear line of sight from their daily work to the organisation's most important goals.
How The OKR Hub Can Help
The OKR Hub specialises in helping businesses navigate organisational change in a way that ensures purposeful and sustainable results.
We've worked with a number of financial institutions — both large and small — and been able to implement an OKR strategy that enables an organisation to get the best out of its people and processes.
Our way of working is highly collaborative. We pride ourselves not only on guiding organisations through the OKR process, but on building the capability of their people through training and coaching, so as to ensure the long-term sustainability of any transformation.
We truly believe that OKRs can be used to support enhanced strategic alignment and help organisations focus on the outcomes they're driving towards.
Book a free consultation to find out how we can help your organisation connect strategy to execution.