Saranen Consulting Ltd
Saranen Consulting, a company providing recruitment training and career services, values a management approach centred on people, granting their experts both power and responsibility. To expand their internal work strategically, they selected OKR as their method and partnered with Henri Sora for his expertise.
Results in just two quarters
When Janne Lindfors, the CEO of Saranen Consulting, reached out to Henri Sora in September 2021, the company, with approximately 100 employees, had already embarked on an internal cultural transformation aimed towards a more collaborative and individual-focussed work approach for 18 months. Saranen sought the next progression in his journey, one that simplifies experts managing their daily tasks and enhances transparency at the company level. Lindfors requested Sora lead an OKR workshop for his management team. The workshop was compelling and resulted in the OKR method being chosen as a strategy tool under Sora’s guidance.
“We had no previous experience of OKR and I wanted someone with a strong knowledge of it to spar with us. Henri helped us both to build the overall framework and at the same time to build some basic skills and understanding, for example to think about what is a good objective and what is a good key result and how they relate to our KPIs. These are the basics, but OKR deployment will not work if there is confusion,” says Lindfors.
Saranen’s OKR deployment started in January 2022. At the beginning of the year, Sora was active in guiding the work and mentoring Saranen’s own OKR coach, but towards the end of the year, the OKR work was already done quite independently with Sora’s support. Although it usually takes around three to four quarters to implement the methodology, Saranen had already made OKR part of the organisation’s daily routine within six months, and the teams achieved the objectives and key results set during these two quarters. Saranen’s improvement-oriented culture and previous development work, such as making team objectives and action plans public throughout the company, self-direction and agile working practices, enabled rapid OKR adoption.
“A method like OKR was needed in our organisation as part of the overall transformation of our business. The success of the implementation was also due to the commitment of the entire management and key people to the method, as well as the good cooperation between our own internal coach and Henri,” says Lindfors.
OKR has improved the manageability and transparency of work
Lindfors says that the implementation of OKR has improved the manageability and transparency of Saranen’s work. Tangible Growth, the OKR tool of choice, brings all the necessary information together in one place.
“The company-wide OKRs now provide a clear direction for the work of the different teams and their own objectives and key results. From our OKR tool, anyone can see what is being done in different teams, how things are progressing and where there are challenges. We have also collected other data in the tool, and it now contains all the relevant information on where Saranen is going,” says Lindfors.
Genuinely on the customer’s side
After a year of intensive implementation, cooperation between Saranen and Sora will continue and Sora will support Saranen’s OKR work when needed. Lindfors considers the cooperation with Sora to be very good and says he has recommended Sora to other companies considering OKR deployment:
“We like Henri’s directness and customer-oriented approach. We appreciated that Henri seemed to genuinely think of our best interests, and was willing to reduce his own input at appropriate points when it seemed we were doing well on our own. His professionalism is clearly evident, and in a few places he prevented us from going astray. Working with Henri is clear and he puts his point of view across without being overbearing.”