68% goal achievement and increased transparency with JOP; Saffron Tech’s story of quarterly success through OKR+

1,100
Employees

25%
increase in performance completion rate on end of year reviews

16%
increase in survey participation

COMPANY OVERVIEW

Digital companies are in the mode of expansion, so is their employee management system. Saffron Tech is a digital and technology transformation company that meets the digital needs of global brands in all niches. The client aimed to reward the employees and wanted to rework the way they manage the performance of their employees. At this time, when digital was undergoing rapid changes and the competition surged, the Saffron group knew it needed to find more efficient and effective ways to keep both managers and employees focused and motivated. Although the client always had weekly and quarterly meetings to keep track of the company’s growth due to the paradigm shift during the pandemic, they reached a point where keeping up with everybody became tough. Thus, they needed a new agile structure of continuous performance management that could help them seek stability in today’s demanding business environment.
Our client wanted a one-step solution with a holistic pproach that fits well in the dynamic business environment with high competition

We love JOP because it keeps everyone in the organization focused and informed,” The easy-to-understand interface of JOP takes less time tonavigate beyond anticipation. This way, every employee in the company can get started with their own JOP portal without any extensive training. Also, using the tool enables managers to focus more on the pressing priorities as it helps in seamlessly managing the performance of employees since the day of onboarding. Thus after every hire, Simranjeet introduces JOP to the employees to make their performance management both effective and efficient.
JOP works as a personal work diary for their employees where they plan everything they do. So basically, the company sets a series of big annual goals for employees, then later they divide these objectives between each quarter. JOP brings weekly updates, 1-on-1s, ongoing feedback, agile management, and performance reviews at ease.
Simranjeet Kaur (HR Manager- Operations)

THE CHALLENGE

As Saffron Tech moved towards workforce expansion, they felt the need for a mechanism to align the strategy with the execution and understanding. The push was needed to achieve priority goals. Though the company was undergoing changes that led to a series of innovations and new opportunities for employees, the need for a clear roadmap emerged. In such cases, clear goals and focus are a must to provide a sense of direction while informing the employee if they are heading down the productive path.

The client was also struggling with achieving employee autonomy. Giving employees the freedom to work in a way that suits them contributes to employees’ sense of engagement with their tasks and organization. Usually, organizations that prescribe tasks end up killing the initiative and creativity of their employees. All this sums up to killing employee engagement.

As we went ahead, we discovered the challenge in agile management and task tracking as well. Some employees were using paper whereas the new-age ones used spreadsheets or another digital medium. This created a mess in the overall action tracking.

JOP’S APPROACH TO MANAGING THE NEW WORLD OF GROWTH

MANAGEMENT THROUGH OKR+

Saffron Tech followed an expert-led consultative approach, which paved the path beautifully for leadership to translate their chosen strategy into OKRs and for teams to understand exactly where their work fits into this framework. Every team in the company had their OKRs defined in their JOP portal, this allowed employees to plan their actions for a predetermined objective. Through sessions with the coach, JOP Champions

With comprehensive details available in the JOP structure, teams attained a clear picture of where things stood on their quarterly targets. Looking at the OKR+ dashboards eliminated the noise and helped teams focus on attaining high-impact goals. When everybody in the organization had clear goals, the focus on having better career conversations and aligning feedback directly with skill development increased substantially.
With changing work arrangements and reduced face-to-face contact among teams, individual wins were going unnoticed by many in the company and place landscape, achieving a milestone was going nnoticed by many employees. This caused employees to feel less engaged and devalued. Having a dedicated feedback section on JOP right next to the goal dashboards made it easier to give feedback and recognize team members for their wins. This helped Saffron focus more on appreciatingpeople for what they are doing and making it public for the whole team to celebrate achieving milestones.
Within a month of getting started with JOP, employees started getting a taste of how mutual progress is made and concerned areas are targeted through regular check-ins. The transparency made it possible for leadership to track successes while keeping employees engaged.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Having an expert to set things up was immensely useful as it paved the path beautifully for leadership and teams to understand the OKR philosophy of work.
Using the JOP framework, Saffron could strategically break down the company’s vision into achievable milestones and sync actions between departments.
JOP has become part of Saffron’s induction and onboarding strategy for new hires. It brings weekly updates, 1-on-1s, ongoing feedback, agile management, and performance reviews with ease.
Employees found great value in using JOP as a personal work diary to plan and document everything they do to move the needle on KRs.
With all of the information on strategy and actions held in one place, company members have better data to identify concern areas and can spend their time in problem-solving and being more effective.

CHALLENGE

Designing a employee centred goal and growth process.

SOLUTIONE

Setting goals successfully to build a high-performance culture

RESULTS

This coupled approach between JOP and the OKR coach played an essential role in giving the Rezo team clarity and confidence in achieving their growth objectives.