How Leapsome helped nTech to establish unifying goals, improve the quality of their meetings, and became part of their cultural fabric.
“You will not regret working with Leapsome. You get amazing quality and a lot to work with for the price.
If Leapsome were just for meetings alone, companies would already see a benefit. But if you’re looking to start your OKR journey, Leapsome is a no-brainer. There’s just no way to replicate this intuitive engagement in a spreadsheet.”
Like many other companies in 2021, nTech was facing the challenges that come with going remote for the first time. Keeping a company aligned and brainstorming new initiatives isn’t easy when the team can’t come together and meet around the watercooler to spark new ideas.
Jimmy Ianuzzi, Vice President & General Manager at nTech, recounts two issues with their goal management in particular, which ultimately led the team to start searching for a solution.
nTech was implementing OKRs for the first time, and they wanted a solution that could support them. Previously, teams were tracking goals on an ad-hoc basis using simple spreadsheets. Jimmy was also aware that OKR adoption presents a big challenge for many teams and ultimately contributes to companies struggling with the framework. Employees at nTech were already independently setting goals within their teams, so getting the whole company to use a new system to unify goal management was not an easy task.
“Our goal-setting was fragmented. There were some areas that we were doing really well and others, not so much. We knew that an OKR tool would help establish best practices across the organization. That’s a big reason why we decided to go with the OKR route.
Beyond that, a huge driver was the concept of inter-team collaboration on bigger company goals. This was a covid-pandemic problem. When we were all in the office together there was natural collaboration. Once we started working remotely, expanded the team, and started hiring outside our local metropolitan area — as much as we tried, that sort of collaboration just wasn’t the same.”
Apart from needing an OKR tool, Jimmy and the team were thinking about the broader picture and were hoping to find a solution that would support nTech in implementing a strong performance management strategy. Ultimately the tool had to cover the following areas:
Additionally, the tool needed to be intuitive for both admins and users and offer integrations with google calendar in order to send out reminders.
Jimmy and his team explored various solutions, from tools mostly focused on OKR and project management, like Asana, Koan, Betterworks, Ally.io, to tools with wider capabilities, including features for increasing performance and engagement. They shortlisted Leapsome, 15Five, and Lattice as their preferred people enablement software and ultimately decided that Leapsome would be the best choice.
“Leapsome was the most polished. It worked. If you just looked at Lattice’s website, you might get the impression that they have more features, which seems impressive. Once we got into the demos, we realized that Lattice would not work for us.
The overall design for users was quite confusing — even for tech-savvy people like me. With Leapsome, it was very straightforward, it felt very easy to navigate through the platform.The admin console was easy, and there was a lot of customization to it.
The group meeting agendas and action items were a huge win. Leapsome was one of few tools to offer group meetings, which blew my mind. Plus, the pricing was very reasonable for the size of our company. All in all, it felt like a good fit.”
Leapsome offered nTech a complete solution for OKR management, performance evaluations, and meeting tracking, plus the possibility of expanding into learning, surveys, and compensation planning in the future.
Apart from the ability to host team meeting notes and action items in Leapsome, Jimmy especially appreciated the cascading goal view and the goal tree. It helped the team to easily visualize how various goals relate to one another and how every employee’s goals contribute to larger initiatives. Both features “just make sense. The average user is going to easily understand this without much explanation.”
In under 6 months, the team at nTech were able to roll out a company-wide OKR process. They started introducing employees to Leapsome through the Meetings module, ensuring that people had an easy entry into the platform. In under a month, most meetings were connected to agendas in Leapsome, including team meetings, 1:1s, and leadership meetings. The team also introduced the Praise Wall to the team.
From there, it didn’t take long before the entire team at nTech was using Leapsome daily, and by the end of the first half year, Jimmy and the team felt confident about goal adoption and goal management and were seeing clear progress. Employees at nTech report feeling more organized, and the spreadsheets they’d been using for meeting notes and goal setting have been long forgotten. Instead, they’ve been replaced with a tool that genuinely impacts their productivity and improves processes.
“Leapsome makes your work life more organized without you having to create an organizational structure. At nTech we loved using our spreadsheets to keep organized, but now with Leapsome we can be organized without even doing anything. You just log in and it keeps you organized.
I think that has generally given people more time. You don’t have to hunt down action items, your agenda, or the goals and key results that you’re responsible for.”
Jimmy and the team had initially been worried about bringing a new goal framework into the team, as employees felt attached to their spreadsheet systems. However, with Leapsome, they found that people were very responsive to the new tool and even began inputting their own goals unprompted.
"This level of utilization and buy in has truly exceeded my expectations. While leadership has been sponsoring our company-wide cross-functional OKR process, individuals and teams have been setting goals and talking about them in their meetings - without any prompting.”
People at nTech are now reliably using Leapsome to set up and track goals. For example, the talent acquisition team have been setting up group goals, and other employees have set up individual development initiatives. The team has officially retired their spreadsheets and enthusiastically accepted the new tool.
Being able to tie contributors and initiatives to individual team results has also been a game changer for nTech. Now Jimmy can’t imagine the company without Leapsome.
“OKRs have been good for nTech, I’m really glad. We always say, “Leapsome is staying with us, there’s no leaving it, it’s part of our fabric now.” It would be really hard for us to leave.
It would be hard to change, and I don’t think we ever would because Leapsome is part of our lives at nTech. I think, if anything, we want to expand.”
Jimmy believes that Leapsome’s meeting module has been a valuable addition for nTech. It’s the most used and beloved feature by everyone in the company. The dashboard is home to everyone’s action items, and it helps the team stay organized. The ability to search through past meetings gives clarity, and overall, meetings are more prepared and productive than before.
For quite some time, nTech had paused its performance review processes as it had not been working as well as it could. Instead, they relied on individual managers checking in with their direct reports on defined metrics. This meant that if things were going well, they would not have a performance review.
Now nTech is a much bigger company, and many things have changed. They’ve expanded into India, which led to a need for consolidated performance management.
After six months of testing their new review process in Leapsome with a pilot group, nTech recently launched these for the whole company.
This time around, the team feels confident about their performance management. They’ve set up a competency framework to tie into reviews, ensuring that everyone is evaluated fairly and consistently.
Apart from their new and improved performance review process, the team at nTech are keen to explore other modules within Leapsome. The learning module especially is next on Jimmy’s agenda. He also believes that the compensation module would be useful to facilitate cumbersome tasks surrounding compensation and promotion management.
Overall, it’s clear to Jimmy that Leapsome is here to stay at nTech and he’s excited to keep working together in the future. He’ll be visiting our New York office in May and is looking forward to meeting the team behind the product.
“We’re complete fans of Leapsome. It’s become part of our fabric. We engage with it so much, most people log in every day. It’s really nice, so intuitive, and from our side, there are zero regrets about it — we’re really happy to be working with them.”
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