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We Miss The High Energy Of Working With Colleagues At Office: President & COO at Profit.co

BW People in interaction with Senthil Rajgopalan, President & COO at Profit.co discussing the recent scenarios in the industry due to COVID disruption and how are they efficiently managing the crisis-like situation.

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Working from home is new which is being accepted by the employees/ team. Can OKRs play a role to motivate them?

The system of OKRs requires that the organization and department have no more than five (5) objectives (3 recommended) and three-five (3-5) Key Results every quarter. It is also encouraged to have the “Tasks linked” to the chosen Objectives and Key Results. This framework along with the “weekly check-ins” (reporting on the status of Key Results) ensures that individuals and teams stay focused even while working from Home.

The “Bottom-Up” aspect of OKRs greatly empowers the employees. They choose their Key Results to be aligned with the Corporate Objectives and Key Results.

Finally, Transparency is a key tenet of OKRs. When all OKRs are visible to everyone a healthy business culture and “Social Contract” of achievement emerges. People strive to do their best and have their teams show progress week after week during the review meetings. This employee engagement helps the organization to achieve better even with a “Work from Home” environment”

How easy is it to deploy OKR? Does it replace already deployed HRMS?

Our intuitive, cloud-based, OKR platform is very easy to deploy be it small / mid-sized or large enterprises. With no burden on capital expenditure or the need for any additional assets/resources, our OKR platform can be easily integrated with the following collaboration platforms-

  1. Jira
  2. Slack
  3. G-Suite
  4. Office 365
  5. Microsoft Teams

OKRs can work in parallel or independent of the HRMS system. Let me further elaborate by pinning down a few differences-

  1. HRMS is employee-centric while OKRs are organization-centric.
  2. While HRMS assessments can be annual or bi-annual, OKR reviews can be for any desired time period or frequency. Typically OKRS are designed for a quarter and reviewed every week.
  3. While KPIs are a metric for an HRMS system, OKRs, offer the execution plan and automated tracking of these KPIs at any desired interval of time.
  4. Key results may or may not be a KPI.

As the leader, how are you keeping the morale up in the organization?

We are sensitive to the turbulence in the economy and the widespread displacements in many verticals, We are fortunate that most of our work can be executed from Home, though we miss the high energy of working with colleagues at the office and the friendly banter.

With the economy littered with layoffs and grim news all around, all of us in Profit.co are grateful to have the opportunity to work in this incredible organization operating in a high growth space of OKRs.

The work is challenging and demanding and with client requirements pouring from all over the globe, the Marketing and Sales Organizations are on their toes, irrespective of the underlying economy.

Our Engineering and Customer Success teams are also used to working in a high-velocity environment with releases happening every week. To sum up, people are busy solving challenging business problems within a great collaborative business environment. This keeps up the morale high in all seasons. We also have customers across all verticals and hence have been able to weather the demand variations better.

This time more than ever businesses want to avoid layoff, how are you efficiently managing the staff?

We work like a lean start-up and have been very prudent with resource allocation. We are also in a high growth space and have demand coming from all verticals and all over the globe. This ensures that local demand variations are evened out and the teams are still working at high utilization levels. Actually we are hiring for our Engineering, Marketing and Sales teams.


Tags assigned to this article:
Senthil Rajgopalan Profit.co COVID-19 lockdown employment hr

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