Norse Digital - Using employee feedback to set OKRs for their culture

Norse Digital is a digital product studio based in Oslo, Norway. They create digital services that put the user at the heart of everything, with a notably human-centric approach. They needed a way to measure people-focused initiatives.

By using our Organisational Fitness framework, they found a way to use employee feedback to lead their OKR setting – even around more intangible concepts like culture.

The challenge: understanding company culture without HR

• 60 employees, but no HR department or large management team
• A focus on OKRS in other aspects of the organisation
• The need for tangible targets around company culture

Norse Digital use objectives and key results (OKRs) to set their direction as a business, which is easy enough to do when you’re looking at marketing, product, sales and finance. However, when it comes to something like organisational culture and people, it’s much harder to define and set measurable targets.

There are about 60 people working for Norse, so they don’t have a HR department that can dedicate the time needed to achieve this. So finding a way to map their company culture and identify insight was very important , that’s where we came in with our Organisational Fitness survey.

The solution: our Organisational Fitness survey

• Our Organisational Fitness survey i.e. a full company scan
• Identified strengths, and new areas to focus on

Our Organisational Fitness framework always starts with a survey of your team, which was delivered in a two-week window. We ask under 20 questions, and each one is proven to have a direct impact on productivity, NPS and growth.

After that, we created a report for Norse Digital that showed the areas where they were doing well, and any areas they could improve. This report gave them the chance to spot opportunities for rapid improvement, as well as the high scores that they could celebrate.

The results: extremely high response rates that delivered key insights

• 95% response rate, showing encouraging signs of engagement
• Positive scores across the board
• 1 key focus area to improve in: customer service

Asking fewer questions, all of which are linked to business outcomes, means response rates are high – and in Norse Digital’s case it was 95% of their employees who engaged in the survey.

Norse’s results were very positive on the whole. They’re a dynamic, healthy company with a flat structure, where everyone’s voice is heard. But in a way, when everything’s going so well, it’s a bit harder to spot the areas you could improve on. That’s what makes this sort of analysis so much more valuable. Evidence-based, measurable answers that give them the confidence to move forward and set OKRs.

Organisational Fitness looks at 16 areas of your business, and for Norse Digital, there was 1 key area that needed to be improved relative to others – customer service. This is what their employees were flagging as critical to making the business more successful. Our own research into Organisational Fitness shows that customer service is lower for tech companies than the national average, so it’s not an uncommon problem in this industry.

Next steps: a new focus for senior managers

This gave the senior managers exactly what they needed. They knew how their employees were feeling about the company culture, and were able to deep dive into the ways they could make improvements to customer service.

That’s why we offer a wide range of ‘deep dive’ surveys – so when you learn what you need to focus on, you can plan a clear plan to do so.