Case Study – Jim Yoshimura
You were there to teach, you were there to help us learn the process, you were there to make sure we didn’t go out into traffic and get run over and to keep the program going on.
Tim Meinhardt, CEO of Atruity, interviews Jim Yoshimura, Chief Operating Officer at Diversant
Tell us a little bit about yourself and who you work for?
So let’s see, I’ve had one of these backgrounds and I’ve been working for gosh, over 40 years now in a variety of industries. Some people might call that a really great experience, and some other people might say I just haven’t figured out what I want to be when I grow up yet. But currently, I’m the Chief Operating Officer for Diversant and Diversant is one of the top IT staffing companies in the country and I’ve been here about seven years.
Prior to this, I was with large organizations like Manpower and EDS for a while and I was also in management consulting for quite a few years. High-end management consulting, which I think is really great because it rounds out your experience and certainly gives me an appreciation for the work that organizations like Atruity does as well too. It really helps me you know I think as we look to partners to help us with certain things, it also helps shape how we want to be able to work with partners because as a prior consultant myself, I’ve seen things that at least in my opinion, work better than others in terms of adoption by the client and success in terms of what the program is trying to accomplish.
When we started on your OKR project, what were your goals and the organization’s goals and why were they important to both you and the whole entire organization?
So, we’ve been a very high growth organization in the last, especially the last five or six years, ever since the company has started 15 years ago, but especially in the last four or five years with emphasis in the last two or three. We’ve really expanded the breadth and scope of our organization and the size of the management team. So, for example, when I joined the company seven years ago, we probably had 15 people in our management ranks and various functions and today we’re up to 60.
So, when we started the OKR process, that was probably 50. So, as you can imagine, when you start to scale an organization, keeping everybody aligned and keeping everybody focused on the priorities that are important, as well as keeping track of how they’re doing against those priorities, becomes a Herculean challenge if you don’t have a process and you don’t have a methodology for setting goals and keeping track of people’s progress and communication, alignment, all the factors that are really, really important. So, we went off looking for a methodology and some of us had been involved with similar methodologies in the past before, so we started doing some research and looking at different approaches and settled on OKR’s as the methodology we felt would best fit what we’re trying to accomplish.
Share with me your thoughts on the OKR implementation process and what part of the process was most impactful to your organization, Jim?
Well, I think that the initial period, training the senior management team from the start, the first two layers of starting with our executive management team, the next layer down, was hugely important because Tim you know this as well as anybody else, there needs to be buy-in by the leadership of the organization and these types of initiatives need to be driven from the top down.
So, it was really, really important that we bring everybody up to speed in terms of what this process and methodology was all about and what their roles in it needed to be because they needed to own this completely. So, I think the initial education period, the initial training and the initial rollout at the executive level was really important because it really made sure that this was an important priority for the company and that everybody clearly understood that.
Then the process of initially setting Objectives and Key Results of the initial, probably first layers of the organization, was hugely important because we hadn’t done things like that before. So, getting in the rhythm of what those needed to look like and what the pitfalls challenges are around – what’s the difference between an objective, what’s a key result, how do those get to relate to each other? It might not be a good idea to have 27 key results on somebody’s plate or something like that. So, I think this is where Atruity really came in helpful because of experience you’d have with other companies of really helping to guide us and make sure that we didn’t go too far down the wrong path and get a bad taste in our mouth. So, I think how you start off with anything like this is so, so important in terms of education, buy-in and then really driving this from the top down.
How did COVID affect your business and your OKR Program? Your organization got started with OKRs right as COVID hit and that was a big challenge.
Well, the fortunate thing is I think we started Tim, right around the first of the year, right? 2020. So, I think we were several months into it before really, I think, as COVID really impacted businesses shutting down, end of March, first part of April, fortunately we had a quarter to get the program established, to have those initial meetings, face-to-face meetings.
I think though, some of those first face-to-face meetings with the top two layers were really, really important in terms of getting everybody on the same page, helping them set their Objectives and Key Results. But then when COVID hit, I think we learn quickly to operate in a virtual mode, which we needed to anyway, because once we roll that out to the next layers of the organization, we’re talking at that point in time, 30, 40 more people, right?
So, you can’t do that if you always have to do face-to-face meetings. So fortunately for us, our infrastructure really supported a virtual operating environment. I think the tools have come rapidly, like Zoom and others. So, we were really able to still have a lot of that face-to-face communication, but as we rolled out to the field, do it in a practical manner and one that wasn’t terribly impacted by COVID.
So, what were some of your team’s key challenges that they faced before you were doing the OKR program and why were these challenges important to you and your organization to solve?
Well, I think some of the challenges from an organizational standpoint where, there was consistency to how people managed, how people set goals and expectations for the people in their own organizations and their own departments. Certainly there was no process or anything like that. Some people were more rigorous than others.
A lot of people would set goals and not do a good job of holding people accountable for those goals and so we knew we had to solve that problem, because we were institutionally, as I said earlier in the podcast, when we realized, as we grew so rapidly and we grew the size and scale of our organization, we quickly came to the realization that we needed something to help us all be on the same page, and we needed a process that we could utilize to make sure that people understood what people’s goals and objectives are. I think one of the most important things is everybody gets to see everybody else’s goals, right, at all levels.
So, you can see your peers, you can see the next two layers up and you can see how all those tie together because they all flow down from the corporate objectives and strategies. That’s so important for people to see that what they’re doing is in line with the company’s overall objectives.
Interested in learning more about how we can help your organization grow through utilizing OKRs?
How did your organization find and dedicate the time to get this done?
So, there’s two answers to that question, Tim. Well, there’s probably a lot of answers, but the first one I’ll give you is a little bit of a smart Alec remark because you might ask yourself, how do you not find the time?
So, if you realize that it’s important to get all of your organization on the same page, you have a process for setting goals and you have a process for helping people stay focused on those goals and to stay focused on the most important things that they do (instead of all the wrong things). How could you as an organization not dedicate the time that’s necessary to get this fully implemented and embedded in your organization, right?
It’s like the old adage about training. Well, what happens if you don’t train them, right? But the other side to it is, is that what we realized is that it wasn’t really that time consuming. So, as we rolled it out across the organization, for most people, it was once a quarter we set new goals, that became maybe an hour-long process, right?
And then, we typically have update meetings, every manager has update meetings every two weeks with their team and that meeting might last like I have one this afternoon with my team and that’s an hour, right?
So, what we’re really dedicating is an hour once a quarter to set goals for every manager and an hour, every two weeks – that is not a significant amount of time. In the pre-COVID days, we’d spend that much time just going out to lunch. So I think it’s not as time-consuming as people might think. One of the things we did do that I think that was really important is that we did hire an extra staff, which freed up one of our executive level people to be the internal champion, right?
And eventually the internal owner. He obviously spent a fair amount of his time, especially early on with you, Tim, learning and working together. So it became probably, and it was initially probably, 30% to 50% of his job, but over time, as he’s gotten used to it and more comfortable with the process, I would say today, he probably spends about 25% of his time, but we feel it’s really important to have that executive champion that owns the overall process for the company and helps make sure people are getting done what they need to get done in terms of keeping with the rigor.
I think the rigor is so important because you have to embed this to the point where it’s part of your routine. If you don’t keep pushing that, you don’t keep monitoring that people are setting objectives and people are having the update meetings, which are so critical, that I think it tends to fall by the wayside as just another management program.
So, let’s talk about some key takeaways for you and your organization today. Your entire organization is really crushing it. Was there a tipping point of some kind?
Well, again, I think that unfortunately, in most cases, you can’t really tie success, however fleeting, to one thing, one or two things. There are some key milestones in the company, I think. In early 2020, we took a step back as a company and realized that while we were doing well, we were not going to continue to grow at the pace we needed to. So, we really took a step back and involved, large portions of the company leadership to really look at ourselves and decide what are some of the things that we need to fix?
I think one of the keys there was involving people at all levels who own their parts of the process, instead of just senior management coming up with some answers and forcing it down everybody’s throats. So, that was really key because it really started to address some of the things holding us back, right?
But it addressed it in a way that there was ownership at all levels. One of the things, obviously Tim, that we realized is that we needed to process. We needed an OKR methodology to help us with goal setting, to help us keeping track of what are the things that we need to be doing to make sure we meet those goals, and a process that was part of our routine management routine in terms of being able to stay focused on these and be flexible at the same time.
So certainly, this was all happening at about the same time as we started to investigate possible approaches. That’s when we said, “Okay, there’s this methodology called OKR.” While none of us had been through it before, we were familiar with it. We were familiar with similar ones. After a certain amount of research, we came to believe that it was the right approach for us.
Share with our audience a little bit about what it was like to work with Atruity?
I think that from early on, of course, when you start working with a new organization that you haven’t worked for, there’s always a little bit of trepidation about, “Okay, yeah, it all sounds good during the sales process,” right?
But the real question is how’s that going to work out? How are the personalities going to mesh? How’s the culture fit between the organization? Are they really aligned to rolling out the program that we believe is right for us, in terms of approach, or is there something else they’re trying to accomplish? Because if you don’t know people, you don’t know your partner from previous experience, those are always going to be questions.
So, I think for us, Tim, working with the Atruity in the first few months, we realized that we’d made the right choice. I think a couple of most important things to us about a partner in this area was one, having somebody that had been through it before and had experience with it. I think the most important part of that is you learn from mistakes, you saw things that didn’t work and you saw things that did work, and you could bring that experience to the table, of saying, “Well, I’ve seen this before and while all companies are different, here’s some pitfalls to watch out for.” It’s kind of like when you take the training wheels off your kid’s bike, your role as a parent is not to ride the bike for them. Your role as a parent is just make sure they don’t go out in traffic at that point in time and get run over.
So, I felt like with Atruity, it was really a good culture fit. You really worked hard to have this be a facilitated conversation instead of doing the workforce, as some consultants are apt to want to do, right?
And so it was always our work that needed to be done. It was always us having to figure things out. You were there to teach, you were there to help us learn the process, you were there to make sure we didn’t go out into traffic and get run over and to keep the program going on. I think also importantly, you know this, one of our objectives was over a longer-term period of time say, a little bit over a year, our goal was to be self-sufficient, right?
For you to teach our internal champion, to get us to the point where we felt it was really part of our routine and our management organization. But we always said the goal is for us to be able to do this on our own. We just knew we couldn’t do that right away.
So yeah, to me, Tim, it’s really interesting because there’s a lot of approaches that can work, but maybe the most important thing about any methodology, or approach, or process like this is how you implement it, right?
And how you make it part of the routine. It’s like buying a new piece of enterprise software, a lot of great software out there, but it’s how you implement it and make it part of your routine and make it successful, that I think are the most important things.
What are the biggest benefits you think your organization has received, from not only working with us, but implementing an OKR program and really what’s happened since you got this result?
Sure. So, let me give you some of the anecdotal things and then I’ll give you some statistics, I think, that can tell you certainly what OKR’s had some portion of the impact upon. As I said, I think the most important thing is that this is now embedded and rolled out to probably 70 or 80 people in our organization, about 50 or so which are management level people and the other are staff level people that we felt it was important to involve them in this process. So, I think one of the great things, this has been a great success. Again, making sure that people set quarterly goals and objectives and focus on the things that are going to help them meet those goals and because we’re doing bi-weekly readouts on those with managers and their staff, it makes sure that we keep the right attention on it, but we also are flexible if things come up, realizing that things come up in business that you have to deal with.
So most importantly, I think one of the big ones is now we have a solid methodology that’s bought in by the whole organization and utilized on a day-to-day basis, to focus on making sure that people are working on what really matters to their organization and to their contribution to the organization and by having them be part of that biweekly update, they have to stay focused on where am I at on that? I’m going to have to talk about this in two weeks. I’m going to have to report back where I’m at on it. So, they’re always thinking, “Okay, I got to get this done because I can’t say that I’m not doing anything on these objectives that we’ve determined are important in organization.
So, I think one of the big wins is it’s bought in, it’s embedded. We have to work to keep it that way, but I think it’s really transformed our organization in terms of rigor, consistency, communication and transparency. Certainly Tim, we were very fortunate, we had a pretty strong 2020. 2020 was a terrible year for most companies across all industries, but including in our industry, most of the people in our staff in the industry shrank in 2020.
We were fortunate, we grew 8% in 2020 despite COVID.
I considered that to be sometimes a little bit of luck, but a lot of hard work, but also I think OKRs were part of that in helping make sure that especially as we had to pivot and change the perspective of what was going on with our customers and consultants and new challenges with COVID and reporting, making sure that our quarterly objectives reflected the changing priorities and changing approaches we needed to take and keeping people focused on it because it would have been very easy for everybody to be distracted in the middle of a global pandemic.
Certainly, it weighed on our minds, but we were able to make sure that as we needed to shift business to meet what we needed to do to not only survive, but thrive in COVID, it was certainly a key part of making sure that people worked out what they really needed to do. So, I have no doubt that the OKR process was a big part of the contribution to our being able to grow in 2020 despite the pandemic.
So, what was your biggest apprehension that you had before working with us and how did we overcome that apprehension for you?
You know Tim, I think the biggest apprehension, and I mentioned it earlier, is that we just didn’t know Atruity right?
I mean, I think certainly the person who referred you to us knew you personally, but we had never worked with you as a consulting partner, right?
So I think one of our biggest apprehensions about any new partner is, okay, we’re going to spend a fair amount of time and energy on this process and we’ve hired the wrong consultant, then that’s going to be waste of time and more importantly, it’s going to hurt the program, right?
And so there’s a leap of faith there that has to happen, right?
Because as I said, unless you’ve worked with somebody before, it’s always a bit of that. Even if you do references, et cetera, you know how that works, right? So, I just think it’s a little bit of the unknown.
I think for us too, even though we had all agreed that a facilitated process, collaboration, teaching was the approach we wanted to utilize, I’ve been involved in places before, where we agreed to those things, but it didn’t happen, right?
It didn’t happen because the consulting company, for whatever reason wasn’t good at that, didn’t want to do that, maybe a combination of things. So that was certainly an apprehension, because we knew eventually we had to stand alone at some point down the road. I think too, our delight is those turned out to be not worries at all. You fit in great with the culture and the organization and you pushed us when you need to push us, right?
And you also let us fall off the bike once in a while and skin our knees, right?
And you helped pick us up and brush us off and put us back on the bike and get us back to the one down the road and learning how to ride that bike on our own. So, I think for us, it was a great experience. That’s why I’m here on this podcast. If it wasn’t, then I wouldn’t have agreed to do it. So, I think the apprehensions were typical of working with any new consulting organization and the proof is always in the pudding but I think we certainly are pleased with the results and pleased with the approach and the fit that Atruity had with us.
What would you say to someone who’s interested in working with us and/or speaking to us about being a client?
Well, first of all, I would be always happy to have them speak to me about it, right? So yeah, I’d say every company is different, right?
Everybody’s different in terms of its culture and the approaches they want to take and what’s important to them about why they’re trying to implement a process like this and what they want to get out of it and how they want to sustain it long-term.
I would emphasize to them, the important part is how you get it adopted, truly bought in at all levels, and then how you sustain that on a long-term basis so that in looking for a consulting partner, I think my advice to any company, is that you need to feel as comfortable as you can about the cultural fit of the people that are going to be working with you, number one.
And number two, is you really need to make sure that the approaches that they’re going to take fit in with what you as an organization want to accomplish. Some companies might prefer to be more hands-off in their approach and have the consulting partner do more work for them. Personally, I’m not sure I buy into that because from a long-term success standpoint, but every company is different. So, I think they need to understand how they want to approach things, where they want to be in 12 to 18 months and then they need to pick the consultant organization that is best fit for them in terms of culture and approach. Methodology is methodology, right?
It’s how your partner helps you and what you’re expecting out of them that’s really important to determine for yourself and then make sure that that organization fits those needs.