Transform 365: Tools and Practices for Building High Performance Teams and Driving Enterprise Transformation
A High Performance Organization (HPO) is characterized by its ability to consistently outperform its competitors through a combination of effective leadership, engaged employees, and a culture of continuous improvement.
Accelerated by the pandemic remote, virtual working has become the norm for many organizations.
This presents many challenges including cultural and technological, but if addressed correctly can unlock high performance team capabilities: new, more efficient and collaborative ways of working.
In today’s competitive business environment, organizations strive to achieve high performance to stay ahead of the curve. A High Performance Organization (HPO) is characterized by its ability to consistently outperform its competitors through a combination of effective leadership, engaged employees, and a culture of continuous improvement.
High Performance Virtual Teams
In this article MIT explores these challenges, identifying best practices that not only support remote team working but in a way where they outperform traditional office-based ones.
The authors identify that yes by default, teams that work in close proximity perform better than those that are remotely distributed due to the face to face human factors that improve communication and collaboration -but- when specific apps and tools are applied to systematize high performance behaviours, Virtual Teams perform better.
This is because by their nature distributed teams are inherently more diverse, calling upon members from nationalities and cultures from across the world, which when united via these high performance practices combine to achieve a much more powerful collective than with less diverse groups that rely on accidental improvements arising from close proximity only.
Transform 365
Microsoft 365 offers these specific apps and tools, and is ideal for enabling these agile ways of working, as it provides the building blocks for global, remote team collaboration, and further integrated into this suite are apps that can define, implement and measure the high performance practices.
These can be utilized to form two key organizational structures to enable Transform 365:
- Agile Transformation Office (ATO) – The central co-ordinating governance team that oversees the organization as a portfolio of projects to manage uniformly.
- OKRs – An objective setting framework for individuals and teams to measure progress across these projects.
Agile Transformation Office (ATO)
This McKinsey article describes the ‘Agile Transformation Office’. An ATO shapes and manages the transformation, brings the full organization along, and—perhaps most important—helps it achieve lasting cultural change.
The ATO is not meant to be an oversight board or another layer of bureaucracy. Instead, it is embedded within the existing structure, pulling in the right business expertise to realize tangible outcomes.
OKRs
‘OKRs’: Objectives and Key Results is a goal-setting framework used by individuals, teams, and organizations to define measurable goals and track their outcomes. The development of OKR is generally attributed to Andrew Grove who introduced the approach to Intel in the 1970s.
Through the establishment of specific, quantifiable outcomes and the adoption of regular progress reviews, OKRs foster a culture of accountability and adaptability. This methodology is particularly well suited to the demands of today’s fast-paced business environment, where agility and precise goal alignment are critical determinants of success.
In this guide we explain how 365 tools including Project, Planner, Teams and Viva Goals can be synthesized together and utilized to implement a system of OKRs to enable a framework for organization-wide high performance enterprise agility.
