Saranen Consulting Oy

When Saranen’s CEO Janne Lindfors contacted Henri Sora in September 2021, the company of around one hundred employees had already spent a year and a half on an internal cultural journey towards a more team- and individual-oriented way of working. Saranen was looking for the next logical step on this journey—one that would support experts in leading their own day-to-day work and increase transparency at the company level—and Lindfors asked Sora to facilitate an OKR workshop for the executive team. The workshop proved convincing, and the OKR method was selected as the tool for strategy work under Sora’s guidance.

“We had no prior experience with the OKR method, and I wanted someone to spar with us who had strong expertise in it. Henri helped us both in building the overall structure and, at the same time, in developing basic capabilities and achieving a shared foundational understanding—for example, what constitutes a good objective, what makes a good key result, and how these relate to our KPI metrics. These are basic matters, but OKR implementation will not succeed if there is confusion around them,” Lindfors states.

Saranen’s OKR implementation began in January 2022. At the beginning of the year, Sora guided the work more actively and acted as a mentor to Saranen’s internal OKR coach, but towards the end of the year the OKR work was already being carried out fairly independently, with support from Sora. Although implementation of the method typically takes around three to four quarters, at Saranen the OKR model had become part of everyday organisational practice within six months, and during those two quarters teams achieved the objectives and key results that had been set. Saranen’s improvement-oriented culture and earlier development efforts—such as company-wide transparency of team objectives and action plans, self-direction, and agile ways of working—enabled the rapid adoption of OKRs.

“There was a clear need in our organisation for a method like OKR as part of our overall transformation. The success of the implementation was also influenced by the commitment of the entire leadership team and key individuals to the method, as well as the strong collaboration between our internal coach and Henri,” Lindfors explains.

Lindfors says that, as a result of the OKR implementation, both steerability and transparency of work have improved at Saranen. The Tangible Growth software selected as the OKR tool brings all the necessary information together in one place.

“Company-level OKRs now provide clear direction for the work of different teams and for their own objectives and key results. Through our OKR tool, anyone can see what different teams are working on, how things are progressing, and where challenges exist. We have also gathered other data into the tool, and it now contains all essential information about where Saranen stands,” Lindfors describes.

After a year of intensive implementation, the collaboration between Saranen and Sora continues, with Sora supporting Saranen’s OKR work as needed. Lindfors describes the cooperation with Sora as very positive and says that he has recommended Sora to other companies considering OKR adoption:

“We value Henri’s directness and client-oriented way of thinking. We appreciated that Henri genuinely seemed to have our best interests in mind and was willing, at the right moments, to reduce his own level of involvement when it became clear that we were able to manage independently. His professional expertise is clearly evident, and on a few occasions he prevented us from going down the wrong paths. Working with Henri is clear, and he brings his perspective forward without being directive.”