4. Heidi Rundt on how they use OKR (Objective & Key Result) at HYPER ISLAND

Welcome to Ready Set Goal, the 15-minute podcast diving into the world of goal-setting strategies. I'm your host Sophie Hiedestod and I want to inspire you to achieve ambitious growth goals within your organization. I work for Knox, which is a platform that makes goal-setting enjoyable for employees as well as leaders. It should be fun crushing your growth goals. Today, I have the opportunity to chat with Heidi Rundt. She is the CEO of Hyper Island. She has an amazing track record within commercial roles and she joined Hyper Island in 2017 and Hyper Island is a digital creative business school that is located around the world but it started out in Sweden. As the CEO, she is responsible for the overall results at Hyper Island. So today, I'm excited to explore her insights on goal-setting strategies for maximum success. Since Hyper Island uses the famous framework OCR, we will dig into how they use the framework, how it developed over time and if there's any potential pitfalls using it. Are you ready? I am Ready Set Goal. Heidi Rundt, very welcome to Ready Set Goal. Thank you so much. It's amazing to be here with you. Can you tell me about yourself? Who are you? Absolutely. So first of all, I'm a very passionate leader, very passionate for growth and actually the reason why I said yes to being on your podcast right away is because I love creating a workplace that enables clarity and the feeling of success and that's why goal-setting to me is really important and that's something I of course work with a lot. Yes, you are the CEO at Hyper Island but can you tell us a little bit what is Hyper Island for those who doesn't know? Absolutely. And Hyper Island was actually found here in Sweden in the southern part in 1996. So we've been around for some time and we are an educational company working with in tech design and business with a really strong emphasis on tech and understanding technological advancements and how we humans fit into that. So a lot of hard skills but also a very very strong methodology on the soft skills of the human skills on how to collaborate and be a great leader. You have students then of course. What is your target audience? This is younger people that just finished their first level of education or who do you target? Actually super broad to be on. So I think if we look at the vocational education in Sweden it's the average age is about 28 but most of the people that we see joining our programs or courses are actually professionals or young adults that have been maybe out in the industry for some time but realize that actually I don't have the skills needed for the future or I really want to make sure that I'm relevant and I can work with the things that are relevant for many industries in the future and that's usually the group that applies to us. And Hyper Island I guess you have a vision of what you're striving towards on a more like long horizon. Can you tell me about your vision and mission and were you a part of setting this? Yes I love to talk about that and I think one thing that's important to first mention is that our vision and our mission are things that have been with us for a long time but what we do is together with the board of directors with the management team but also with our coworkers we go back to these quite often at least once a year and we ask ourselves are these the relevant or do we need to change anything? So at the moment our vision is a world of lifelong learners that's what we want to see that's what we want to be part of achieving and our mission is to increasingly complex and connected world we want to empower lifelong learners and we want to foster transformative experiences that shape the future and this has been with us for a long time already. And how do you break it down to all teams and employees to make tangible goals for them? Do you use a framework or how does that look like for you? Almost seven years I've been with Hyper we've been doing a lot of different trials and tests and prototypes when it comes to goal setting and how to become better at goal setting and we tried different frameworks I have to admit we haven't succeeded until we started to look at the OKR framework and that's the framework we still use the reason why is because it actually resonates really well with a tool a hyper island tool and that's on our toolbox called a content process model and I realized that for us to be able to find a framework that sticks it has to be a framework that makes it easy for all co-workers to understand that we can have a language around it. Why do you think you got specifically happy with the introduce in OKR three years ago? What did you do differently? We constantly changed things we constantly realized things with the framework that we we have to do better but the thing that we really liked was that we can have quite ambitious objectives we can be visionary we can connect these objectives with our strategy and make sure that we actually measure the progress towards that objective to the key results and those might remain the same for the whole year but what we really like about the framework is that it enables us to also look at the initiatives and actions and quite quickly change if we see that actually this doesn't work it doesn't help us reach our key result let's change it so it has this set format that makes it possible for us to connect it with strategy but also there's a lot of flexibility in the system and how many objectives do you have on company level? At the moment we work with only four objectives last year we had way too many and we got also confused and it got way too complex so we did an important piece of strategy work together with the board that's where we landed in four objectives and these are the company objectives that we work with now can you tell us if it's not the secret what are those objectives? Yeah absolutely so in general of course one is connected to growth and that's connected to our vision of a world of lifelong learners if we want to see more people going through the amazing hyper island experiences of course we want to achieve growth so that's one of the objectives and that is objective we have is to foster collaboration we have a presence in Europe A back in America and we really want to see these teams collaborating more closely because there's so much innovation ongoing in all the different regions another one has to do with our company culture that's really important for us and the employee experience so to keep our focus on that one as well it's another really important one and then it has to do with the educational programs we provide we have an objective where we focus on the edginess that stands for hyper island and the quality those are the four thank you for sharing that and how many employees are you? We're about 120 worldwide and how many teams do you have? Actually a lot of cross-functional teams. A lot of cross-functional teams so that's another thing that the teams are quite dependent on each other especially within the regions so we have to make sure that the OKRs will also support this collaboration because being siloed and I'm sure many leaders recognize this it's so easy to become quite siloed so the objectives and key results are also there to help us avoid that. So you have those on company level but does the team also have their own objectives and key results that they link up to the company why they want to? Yes they do and sometimes the objective resonates so well with the team so they actually don't have to come up with their own objectives sometimes the team might feel or business area might feel that we actually have to sharpen an objective to match our goal a bit better and where we are heading but quite often they can link their key results directly to the company objectives and then it's up to the team to craft and that's a quite collaborative process that we have together with the co-workers in the team as well and then the next level would be individual goals would you say that the OKR process also includes individual employee goals? Not really actually we at the moment we work on the OKRs on a team level a business area and a team level but then what we want to see as well and something some some of my leaders are extremely well at doing is connecting these key results to individual goals that we have on something we call an impact map and that's for the individual where it's a discussion between the individual and the leader and how can I as a co-worker tie brand and help to reach these key results and then can you tell us tell me about the process because I mean it's a rolling 12 months I assume when does what happened do you have like a calendar block where you should workshop and send out the template or what is the cadence? Yeah we are actually in the middle of improving that that because we did feel that we have to become a bit faster. Ideally, the objectives and key results for the next year should be set simultaneously as we do budget. And then we follow up on a wider level each quarter, but also have monthly discussions in smaller forums. So, I think and Hayden is really important and also difficult to set. So, you do it parallely with the budget process. And how do you communicate and follow up? How does that look like? Is everyone calling in all over the world in a town hall meeting or can you tell me how do you inspire all the 120 employees to achieve the company objectives in the end? Yeah. Of course, we use town halls a lot to communicate. Another thing is something that we put more and more emphasis on is actually also the written form at the sharing things on Slack. And then we also share, we have a group called the Hyper Island people leaders where we have a very open discussion about the objectives and the key results and that discussion that has happened in that group is then kind of cascaded down as well to the different teams. So, it's both doing town halls, it's sharing in writing and finding different forums to open up for that discussion as well. What would you like to improve in this process? There's always so much that we would love to improve and I think this is typical for Hyper Island. We always look at what can we do better and what can we make more simple? How can we simplify it? So, it's actually two things, simplifying the process, not making it too difficult and that's something we learned last year, it can easily become a beast. The other thing is to follow our process because as soon as we don't follow up, that's where the framework just doesn't mean anything anymore. So, it's really having these two pieces and that's something I still ask my management team constantly, how can we improve this? How can we become better at making it simple and having a better follow-up routine? So, simplify and follow up is the lead word. Absolutely. So, I guess that would be your recommendation as well, talking to other companies, is there something more? I mean, it's a lot of leaders listening to this podcast that wants to get better at goal setting. What do you want to send to them before we end? Not being afraid of imperfection, it doesn't have to be perfect. Just start somewhere and try and find good rituals for implementing something new. Okay, and I would also say hold on to it because going back would be not having a framework, not having like governance around your goal setting would be like everyone doing their own thing, tracking their own KPIs with no governance or clarity. So, you're in it for the long, long run. Yes, exactly. And I think not giving up even in the times where we feel like we're not doing this in the best possible way now. And then it's so easy to just say, we'll give up, we try something else, but I think resilience is key. Super, Heidi. Thank you so much for very clear answers on how you work with the goal setting. Well, thank you for a very, very good question. I love that. Thank you very much. Take care, Heidi. Yeah, too. [Music]