“Mass Work From Home” WFH” created an involuntary transition: Mr Senthil Rajagopalan, COO & President, Profit.co

OKR (Objective and Key Result) may sound something new to many readers, as a subject is very unique. The idea behind the OKR is to provide businesses a solution to effectively manage the workforce to get quality and profitable results. One of the popular platforms that provide such a solution is Profit.co. The foundation of the organization laid down in 2018 and has headquarters in the San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Valley, West Coast.

Profit.co provides Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) cloud-based platform solution integrated with Task Management. You can create Objectives & Key Results at every level of your organization while ensuring complete alignment of OKRs across the organization. It comes with over 300 metrics and allows you to define your custom metrics with ease.

To understand more about OKR and how Profit.co helps organizations to implement it, in order to know where the workforce should focus and what necessary adjustments need to be done to help employees to achieve their targets, we recently have an email interaction with Mr. Senthil Rajagopalan, COO & President at Profit.co.

Senthil Rajagopalan helps companies to achieve strategic goals through OKR software implementation. He works with CHROs and other executives on areas like Operational efficiency, Performance Management, and Employee Engagement. He comes with over 20 years of experience across functions like Sales, Process Consulting, Technology, Customer Management, and has worked with start-ups as well as companies like HCL and Satyam Computer Services in India as well as North America. Passionate about customer enchantment and employee engagement, Senthil spends at least half of his time with customers in the market. He is an alumnus of National Institute of Technology Tiruchirappalli.

 

1. Let’s start with pandemic and work from home – what is the role of OKR in such a scenario?

The COVID-19 pandemic, the related lockdowns, and the forced “Mass Work From Home” WFH” created an involuntary transition to a virtual environment. The absence of a structured work environment can create several challenges: how we collaborate as teams, measuring productivity by time clocked or by output, low employee engagement. Without a traditional structured “work management system” establishing the link between strategy, operational goals, and day to day tasks has become difficult with the onus on the individual managers to ensure employee engagement.

OKR is a great tool that addresses the above challenges and allows us to measure results rather than activities or even output.  This is a fundamental shift on how to measure productivity during COVID-19 which would continue post-COVID-19. OKRs bring in a culture of transparency, with a scoreboard being available for everyone creating an enabling environment.

 

2. What is Profit’s roadmap for the next 2 years?

Profit.co is seeing success in the western markets. Our goal is to grow in the Asia market specifically in India servicing customers like Banks, ITES, Startups. We will be focusing on Iterative Business Execution which is the ability of organizations to embrace digital and experiment with new business models, new approaches to customer-facing processes and keep improving incrementally and exponentially preparing the businesses to be agile. Our focus will be on the key components of iterative business execution: Strategy, OKRs, Tasks, Employee Engagement, and Employee Development.

We would like to improve our number of customers, user adoption, and customer success stories by at least 8 X in the coming 24 months.

 

3. What makes the Profit OKR software unique and different from your competitors?

Profit.co’s SaaS software is a complete work management platform that helps enterprises and startups in strategic vision execution built by a team that has a deep understanding of the subject of OKR and has invested countless hours in OKRs in designing the OKR Canvas which is easily and effectively leverage OKRs in an enterprise.

Profit.co is user-friendly and highly customizable in terms of role management, approval flow, and strategy execution and is also available as mobile apps for the iOS, Android, and Windows environments.

 

4. How easy is deploying Profit OKR and can it be integrated into existing HRMS systems?

Customers find our UI very intuitive and simple to onboard. Our customers rave about the “step by step “guides that simplify the process of OKR creation making it error-free. In addition, we also offer two other methods to create OKRs for mature users and for OKR champions. The OKR SAAS platform also has 6 different types of Key Performance Indicator (KPI) and provides prebuilt templates and a little over 350 pre-built KPIs that make adoption easy. In addition, we also have multiple educational materials to refer, and consultants to guide along with a 24X7 support desk.

Our SAAS platform has an open and scalable architecture and integrates with many HRMS systems, productivity and project management tools, CRMs, and task management systems. Using our rest API, Profit.co’s software can be integrated with any HRMS application. Currently, we have KPI integrations, Messaging integrations, SAML SSO integration, along with several HRMS’ integrations.

All these apart, we also support custom integration based on customer needs.

 

5. What impact will an OKR have on a business that is using an OKR solution and one which is not?

The real value of OKR comes from quick iterative cycles of hypothesis changes and measurement that makes the business execution better and faster.

With OKRs, goal setting holds the key where committed OKRs keep the business as usual aspects of your business running while aspirational goals to iteratively execute your key business priorities can also be set. “Achieving 65% of the impossible is better than 100% of the ordinary”. It’s another version of the “shoot for the stars and you might reach the moon” philosophy. Organizations have taken this as a mantra for goal setting within the OKR framework. For instance, one of our customers, a leading US-based Cloud communications Provider found that integrating their new acquisitions with corporate had become much smoother, with a reduction in cycle time by nearly 20%.

 

6. At last, who do you think, when, and why should a business deploy OKR software?

OKR software can be implemented across any industry, irrespective of whether the company is a profit or non-profit organization, in various sectors such as BFSI, Telecom, IT, Government, Utilities, Retail, etc. from large corporates to SMEs to Start-ups.

OKRs must be deployed at the planning phase and have to be there throughout the execution phases. There will always be continuous learning throughout the quarter and this learning can be institutionalized and incorporated into the next OKR cycle. The process of adopting OKRs can be iterative. Since you have to find your own unique OKR DNA, you have to iterate a few quarters to find your unique sweet spot. If you understand this conceptually, you will be able to steadily make progress towards your ideal OKR position. Regarding when and how to get started, there is a whole spectrum of possibilities. But it is important to get started.

 

7. The customer data collected, is stored on the Profit’s cloud, so what about data security?

Profit.co being a responsible organization is committed to safeguard, process personal data, and uphold privacy rights. “Processing” is a broad term that covers just about anything you can do with data: collection, storage, transmission, analysis, etc. Profit.co declares that such data is only processed for limited and specified purposes consistent with the consent provided by the individual.

Profit.co is GDPR Compliant & follows the principles of EU Safe Harbor and other Privacy domains. Profit.co collects information only for Business purposes. To safeguard the data, Profit.co maintains a well-equipped Datacenter.

Profit.co is accountable for all the data stored outside of the EU and acts as a data controller of Personal Data collected from EU residents and may transfer data onward for processing to other countries, which may not possess Data Protection adequacy levels. This works well as it’s not mandatory under GDPR, that application should be hosted in the EU. Profit.co’s third-party vendors also comply with GDPR.