[00:00:24] Maxime Manseau: Today I'm pleased to hold the fireside. chat with Jenny. Jenny, I, if you want to just say a few words about who you are.

[00:00:34] Jeni Balch: Sure. I'm Jenny Balch with Q2. I have to say I'm not here on behalf of Q2, just to get that out of the way. I'm very much a support lifer. I'm really passionate about the industry.

[00:00:44] Jeni Balch: And I'm really excited to, to talk to everybody today.

[00:00:48] Maxime Manseau: So why OCR? So there is something that I think is very typical from customer support teams. And it's a fact that it's super tough or let's say tougher than other departments, to give people the direction. And I've been talking to a bunch of like support leaders and most of the time, it's like, fuck just my team feeds are, they come to, to answer tickets.

[00:01:12] Maxime Manseau: There is nothing bigger than just answering tickets. Like, how can I avoid that? How can I go to the next level? And. Make my team feel they're waking up for something bigger. It's very easy sometimes, like for example, if you work in sales, to have like clear objective, clear direction, like your team need to double revenue by the end of the year.

[00:01:32] Maxime Manseau: But with customer team, like it's another story. So this is why from, I would say my point of view, I wanted to to talk about OCRs before I jump live with Jenny. I don't know if you guys have I would love to, to know why you decided to join today. So don't hesitate to.

[00:01:50] Maxime Manseau: So this way will give us with Jenny a direction to where to go, but maybe Jenny, like we can start with the problem. I think it's I guess like the best way to start. So what do you think when it comes to Okara today? What's the main problem like customer team face?

[00:02:06] Jeni Balch: Like you said, I think any support team, when an agent comes into work, they know what they're going to do.

[00:02:12] Jeni Balch: They're going to sit down, they're going to answer calls, they're going to take tickets, they're going to go home and they're going to come the next day and do it again. And they're always working towards the same SLAs, the same KPIs it's a slog. The very nature of support is. And so I think that OKRs give teams a way to have an attainable goal outside of these things that never end.

[00:02:35] Jeni Balch: And not just an attainable goal, but a goal that they're invested in along with whoever's working with them. Whether it's one team doing OKRs or several teams in an org. At Q2, I'm lucky enough for OKRs to be done at the very top and trickle all the way down to establish alignment. But it can really help bring teams together, not only under a common goal, but I feel like sometimes managers also get really caught up in other projects.

[00:03:04] Jeni Balch: They're pulled every which way. And by doing this, they can sit down and say, Hey, team. This is a priority to me. You're a priority to me. I'm investing my time. I'm hoping you guys will come along with me to invest your time. So I have found that it drives engagement and really boosts ownership in the team.

[00:03:23] Jeni Balch: And I would say it's repaired some relationships between managers and teams. And I've never seen it hurt. And it usually brings out some things that can be fixed.

[00:03:32] Maxime Manseau: And I will have to, This is a bit different, but for me it's really related to SLAs, like support leaders, like even leaving aside, like the agents and the rest of the teams, even themselves, sometimes don't have a clear direction, for the team, because like most of times, like the CEO or like the , just hire like the support leaders head of support and says Hey, take care of support and basically stays here and it's. Your role as a support leader to basically give a direction to your entire team, which means you and your agents, and you need to, most of the time build it from scratch.

[00:04:08] Maxime Manseau: And I think OCRs are like a, a super simple and clear and powerful, I would say, system process method, could be however you want to move forward,

[00:04:21] Jeni Balch: yeah, and, process change is different no matter what you want to do. Process change, when you are dealing with, A backlog and SLAs and pressure from people who want to see that backlog go down.

[00:04:33] Jeni Balch: I feel like OKRs give you a chance to, like you said, have a framework to build this out. And one that doesn't have to be demanding. One that does not have to be a burden. It can be as involved or not as any team wants it to be.

[00:04:49] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, definitely. There is genuine comments from Anirban.

[00:04:53] Maxime Manseau: I think we're going to take this right now. He's asking what's the difference between Okahars, basically, from Capybara? And maybe it's good because it's true it can be a bit everyone have knows what is a support matrix, support KPIs. What's the main difference with OCARS for you, so this way we can just answer this question from the beginning and everyone has it super clear.

[00:05:13] Maxime Manseau: Sure.

[00:05:13] Jeni Balch: Your KPIs and SLAs are things that every agent knows they're going to come in, sit down, and this is what they're responsible for. They are things that will go on their performance tracking. They are things that the entire floor has goals to set to. They are as much of the banal day to day stuff as any of the work that they do that comes in.

[00:05:36] Jeni Balch: So OKRs specifically are meant to be transformative. They're meant for you to take a really hard look at your team and say, What do we want to do with this? Other than come in and sit down. For some people, that means big changes. For some, that doesn't. It just means processes being illuminated.

[00:05:54] Jeni Balch: But your KPIs and SLAs are completely separate. OKRs are about collaboration, are about making things better when they come in and sit down in that seat. It's not something they're responsible for.

[00:06:12] Maxime Manseau: And I think also, I don't know With OKRs, you're really like, in a sense, like you're trying to improve things, you really have I would say this sense of I care about my support team to improve things, but you don't judge them.

[00:06:25] Maxime Manseau: That with Metrix, I feel like you're much more in hey, this guy did his job the correct way. And I feel like you tend to judge people when you just look at Metrix. This is, on my side what I really like OKRs for. Yeah it's a different mood, basically, to make your team move forward.

[00:06:44] Jeni Balch: Yeah, it's purely collaborative.

[00:06:47] Maxime Manseau: I don't know if you have anything to add on the problem, but if not, we can move to benefits. I know we've been talking to benefits, but I don't know if you have anything to add here, Jenny, or

[00:06:57] Jeni Balch: I think that the main benefit for support teams with OKRs is just to have an attainable goal.

[00:07:03] Jeni Balch: that they can reach, that they can measure and say, this is done. That's not just another support project. They can point it and say, we accomplished this or we didn't. And here's why. It's a chance for insight. It's a chance for collaboration. I've really found valuable.

[00:07:19] Maxime Manseau: Have you noticed any change in your team's performance or morale since implementing Okars?

[00:07:24] Jeni Balch: I had a really struggling team once at Blizzard and I inherited them. And they were not happy and we did a light version of OKRs. It was a very different environment there, but it did build a lot of engagement, a lot of trust between me and the team, because when you come in and replace a manager, does not care, they have no reason to trust that you will.

[00:07:45] Jeni Balch: And so by implementing this, I got to say, guys, we're going to do this and I will be able to be responsible to you to come back and do it. It went a long way to really make us more cohesive.

[00:07:56] Maxime Manseau: Okay, cool. Yeah, makes sense. I think it's we can jump on the process because this is where we're going to spend the most of the time.

[00:08:02] Maxime Manseau: The main idea is to help you guys leave this webinar and be able to replicate what we're going to say, what Jenny going to show you, be able to implement OCRs for people who never implemented it or improve the way you're setting up your OCRs if you already done that in the past. And. I know that Q1 is, almost done, but the main idea here would be for you to take everything we're saying today.

[00:08:34] Maxime Manseau: And try to set up all cars for your Q2. So Jenny and I, the main idea was like today to spend time. So she can teach us like basically how to set up all cars the correct way and show us all the pitfalls, show her tips and tricks. But what makes it powerful too is to share between each other. So you can improve them, share to other super leaders.

[00:08:58] Maxime Manseau: So maybe they went from Zustad to Ocars and I don't know if they didn't work for some reasons. What we want is that you can learn from each other. We don't know yet how we're going to do that, but I was thinking for the people who want I'm going to send you a quick type for, You can just enter your professional email and we contact you like afterwards.

[00:09:16] Maxime Manseau: So you can review the OKRs between each others. We can, in touch to see how it went after the end of the queue. So we just want to make it like actionable. But anyway, Jenny maybe you can walk me through the process a support team uses to set up OKRs. We can start there.

[00:09:34] Jeni Balch: And I want to caveat this with every team is different.

[00:09:38] Jeni Balch: And while there is a set guideline for OKRs, You can't do it wrong. It really is about what you find valuable to transform your team and make things better for everybody. So while we talk about objectives and key results, don't get super hung up on getting those right. I'll go through some examples, but at the end of the day, it's whatever works for you, and your team.

[00:10:01] Jeni Balch: So when you're working with this, you're going to sit down with your team and talk about. objectives. So these should be inspiring, aspirational stretch goals. This is not, we want to achieve 98 percent CSAT this quarter. That's just another metric. Now, that can be a way that you achieve an objective. So an objective for that would be more like, we want to be our customer's best partner.

[00:10:27] Jeni Balch: Which sounds really vague. And sounds like a bit much, because they have a lot of partners. But the idea is the key results that come from that and prove that you are achieving it, make the difference. For example, let me share my screen. It's trying to do it. While we're waiting for it to, maybe this will work.

[00:10:47] Jeni Balch: I apologize.

[00:10:48] Maxime Manseau: I don't see it. I don't

[00:10:49] Jeni Balch: see it either. That's not super helpful, is it? Let me try backing out of it.

[00:10:54] Maxime Manseau: Hi guys. Ginger will join us in a few seconds. Okay. Here you are again.

[00:10:59] Jeni Balch: So sorry about that. No

[00:11:00] Maxime Manseau: worries.

[00:11:01] Jeni Balch: So Max, do you have a link to the OKR tracker? Cause if you let me link it to your real quick, so you can share your screen.

[00:11:10] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, I

[00:11:11] Jeni Balch: apologize folks. Max, I was on the tab. That's a good OKRs and I use good loosely. This is actually an example of what we were just talking about where. This is one of mine that shed a lot of insight into some shortcomings that our team had. Thank you so much. Our aspiration was to build an expert team.

[00:11:34] Jeni Balch: And the way we wanted to do that, or show that we were an expert team, was that 75 percent of our team pursued independent training and they share what they learned. Each team member presents at least one support topic of the week. And we were going to identify the identify the five most frequently asked questions and ensure that they have documentation and your key results.

[00:11:56] Jeni Balch: Words like define, identify, explore, are all going to be really insightful because it points out shortcomings. And these specific OKRs pointed out shortcomings for my team. What we ended up doing was we did all of that and we looked back at it and we said, Are we an expert team? We had no idea.

[00:12:17] Jeni Balch: Max, can you expand the plus sign there on the left?

[00:12:21] Maxime Manseau: Yeah.

[00:12:21] Jeni Balch: Far left.

[00:12:23] Maxime Manseau: Is

[00:12:23] Jeni Balch: it?

[00:12:24] Maxime Manseau: Because I'm on the view. I'm on the view only. So

[00:12:27] Jeni Balch: maybe I can expand it. Refresh it. There we go. That works. So we came back the next quarter and we redid it completely. To build an expert team, we had to identify what expertise meant.

[00:12:41] Jeni Balch: Identifying skills that needed to be mastered, each team member exploring their own proficiency, and then also reaching out to other departments for more training. So these key results should not be a laundry list of what to do. For example, the first key result is identify 50 percent of skills. That need to be mastered.

[00:13:03] Jeni Balch: Your to do list comes in with, okay, what do we have to do to actually make that happen? How do we identify skills that need to be mastered? So my team is going through and making a support skills matrix to help us identify those. Each team member rates their proficiency. How are we going to do that?

[00:13:19] Jeni Balch: We need a method to do that. And so when you're building out these objectives, you're looking for changes you want to see in the team. We wanted to make sure that we had expertise. And then you want to, up to three, some people say up to five, personally, I find that overwhelming. I say up to three key results that you can solidly point to and say, look, this makes us match that objective.

[00:13:45] Maxime Manseau: I, I totally agree with you. You're talking about like how many, like a result, but how many objectives do you recommend? It depends a lot

[00:13:52] Jeni Balch: on the team. So if you have a crazy huge or. Overburdened support team. You don't want to come up to them and say, Hey guys, we're going to do three projects this month.

[00:14:03] Jeni Balch: It's just not going to work. So especially when you're first getting started with them, or maybe you have a team that needs a lot of buy in, just start with one and then bringing in that team that needs a lot of buy in. It might be really hard also to pull out of them what they want to change. So this facilitates that kind of a conversation too.

[00:14:22] Maxime Manseau: Got it. And would you recommend like doing them like by quarter, by month, by semester?

[00:14:30] Jeni Balch: Personally, I like by quarter just because I figure three months for us has been a good sweet spot as far as. Finding something aspirational and making progress towards it. But again, it's really just what's good for your team.

[00:14:46] Jeni Balch: I would say that if you're going for a month, you're probably not thinking aspirationally enough. You want these to take some insight and some real thought behind it. So for me, three months is great for other teams. It may not work, but. Every team can choose what works best for them.

[00:15:03] Maxime Manseau: Okay, got it.

[00:15:05] Maxime Manseau: I have I'm going to read Lucas comments. It's not a question, but I think it's a way he just does it so everyone knows. So he's saying, I have the team and create our OCRs at the start of each quarter during a workshop. We link them to the company OCRs Next, the support leaders split the work into two week sprints and during bi weekly sprint planning sessions and assign the work to ourselves.

[00:15:31] Maxime Manseau: That Even more

[00:15:31] Jeni Balch: structured than I have, and I love that. Because if, another thing about OKRs is that it's a demonstration in investment in your team through time and energy. And if that falls out, it demonstrates the exact opposite. You're throwing them in. You're saying, guys, this is important. We want to work together.

[00:15:50] Jeni Balch: And then if you don't follow through, because it does take time and effort. Then this is a failure more for the team than for any kind of an OKR process. So I love that it's built out to that granularity. With my team, we meet, we have a team meeting every week and we run down, Hey guys, where's the progress on our OKRs?

[00:16:11] Jeni Balch: Are there any roadblocks? So that's how we keep tabs on it.

[00:16:14] Maxime Manseau: And I think Lucas is mentioning something that is very important. And what's your take on this Jenny is about the importance of not setting up your OCARS alone on side as a support leader, but just really doing it as a team.

[00:16:30] Maxime Manseau: And this is really something I think I want to stop one second, but that's super important in the process. It's not hey, guys, this is what's important for our team this quarter. It doesn't work like that, right?

[00:16:44] Jeni Balch: Yeah, no, not at all. If this is not collaborative, then you're bringing work to your team and saying, guys, this is inspirational.

[00:16:52] Jeni Balch: They might not be inspired by that. Guys, this is where we're going to move to. They may not care. And a large part about OKRs is building engagement, building ownership. I would even recommend if a team is really, if the communication has broken down significantly, I would make an anonymous survey and send it out to people and say if you could change one thing about our team, what would it be?

[00:17:16] Jeni Balch: When you take it into a team meeting, you look over and say, Hey guys, I saw these three trends. Let's talk about OKRs and how we can improve that. You have to be a manager that is not defensive or reactive in any way, shape or form to do that. If you do have issues with that, don't recommend inviting that kind of feedback.

[00:17:34] Jeni Balch: But again, like one of the most powerful things about this is its ability to build engagement and relationships between a manager and a team.

[00:17:42] Maxime Manseau: And Concretely, like, how would you do to, if tomorrow I need to start a OKR with my support teams what should I do? Is it should I schedule a meeting of one hour and we just talk with the teammates about what we want to improve, like, how what would the workshop look like?

[00:17:57] Maxime Manseau: I know you just said for example to ask an anonymous survey, but What would be like another way to to.

[00:18:03] Jeni Balch: So the first thing I would do is I would bring up the OKR process in the format of a team meeting when you're already talking about this. Say, Hey guys, this is something we're interested in doing.

[00:18:12] Jeni Balch: Here's what the process is. Here's what it's meant to accomplish. Go back and think about some things. And we're going to have a meeting next week to talk about it. So give them kind of a background of what you're trying to accomplish and have them brainstorm so that they have ideas to bring to it. And then once you've done that, come together, bounce ideas off of each other.

[00:18:35] Jeni Balch: The thing that I've found the most helpful is to identify some key things people want to do and use those themes to figure out your objective. If there is a big lack of training on the team, you may hear things like, we need to improve documentation, we need to improve how the wiki is organized, all that points to a specific thing and we need to be an informed team and being an informed team is very aspirational for a team that isn't informed or doesn't feel informed.

[00:19:08] Jeni Balch: And so once you do that, you've gotten together, you've identified your one, two, maybe three objectives, one, two or three results underneath those. So once you do that, you will assign an owner to each, not the objective overall, and the owner is not responsible for fixing it or doing all the research or doing all the work.

[00:19:31] Jeni Balch: They're just the ones responsible for keeping track of where it is and trying to help other people. Organize to get it taken care of. For example, with the build expert team, each timber team member rates, their proficiency and two most commonly used modules. So in that case, my team lead would go and talk to them one on one and be like, all right, here's a proficiency.

[00:19:53] Jeni Balch: Where do you think you are? And they would have that conversation. So I don't recommend setting. individual key results for one person. Again, it's whatever works for you and your team. But in my experience, making these, just pushing collaboration as much as you can is what's going to build the most value out of them.

[00:20:13] Maxime Manseau: I was like, I think this is from my experience and I have much less than you regarding OCARS, but OCARS is really, to be done at a team level, it's not to assess individuals, just wanted to make, sure right here that we are on the same page, but yeah.

[00:20:30] Jeni Balch: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:20:31] Jeni Balch: And with this one, with the key result of each team member rates their proficiency, for example, That would not work for a team that there wasn't the psychological safety there to be honest about what their proficiency is. If people were sensitive about either feeling, not proficient enough, or maybe people are going to judge them, you'd never want to do this.

[00:20:50] Jeni Balch: So you really have to tailor these to your team very carefully.

[00:20:54] Maxime Manseau: Yeah.

[00:20:56] Jeni Balch: So after you build out your objectives, your key results, you have an owner and I have to keep track of these. And so you'll want a way to, first of all, look at the key result and say, all right, what do we want to hit? What measurable goal do we want to hit?

[00:21:12] Jeni Balch: Is it a percent? Is it a count of, and then you'll, we'll record that and we'll go over recording it and everything later. Then you will also have your goal. It's we want to be at, for example, 50%. That's our goal. You'll write that down. And then every time that you meet on whatever cadence that you do meet, the owner will be the one to track the progression of that.

[00:21:37] Jeni Balch: And you'll want to make note of anything that is a roadblock or just a challenge getting it done. And you'll want to keep notes of what's going on with it as the time passes. Finding roadblocks can also be really insightful because it can call out policies or procedures that just aren't working for your team brought to light just by a key result.

[00:22:00] Maxime Manseau: Yeah, definitely. Do you want me to show another tab of the file yet?

[00:22:04] Jeni Balch: Yeah, let's go to the example tab.

[00:22:07] Maxime Manseau: Okay. This one, right?

[00:22:10] Jeni Balch: This is an example that's going to be in, this is the actual document that you're looking at, that we will be sharing with you. Okay. This is an example, objective and KPR of how it would be put in here.

[00:22:21] Jeni Balch: You have your objective, empower the team to learn and grow, and the three key results you're interested in seeing. If you scroll to the right a little bit, you'll see that they have designated owners for each of those. Forgive me, I watched Breaking Bad really recently. I couldn't think of others to put in there.

[00:22:38] Jeni Balch: And then you're going to look at how you want to record this. Are you looking at percentages, are you looking at totals? And just marking that down, you can delete that column if it's not relevant to you. A lot of people find value in it. So then you're going to mark down your start value. And if you're starting from scratch, you would just put zero.

[00:22:58] Jeni Balch: But sometimes if you're working on improving X number of wiki pages, and you've already improved some of them, you can mark that down here. And that way you're only gauging your actual progression. And then every time you meet, the owner will update that current value to whatever it is at that time.

[00:23:18] Jeni Balch: For example, on the first key result there, Walter is tracking this key result. They're starting from scratch. They want to get to 10. They're at 7, so they've hit 70%. Another thing to mention about your progress is that you are not Hoping to hit a hundred percent on all of these. If you do, either you weren't aspirational enough, or maybe you need to go back to your team and see why they're not pushing for real transformation happening here.

[00:23:49] Jeni Balch: 70 percent is a win. That means you made very significant work and you probably have laid the groundwork for some significant changes. Anything around, 20 is not super great. It didn't work, but if we keep going to the right, we can find out why. After the progress is automatically calculated, the team is going to be able to set their confidence level.

[00:24:10] Jeni Balch: This is how confident they'll be that they can actually get this done. High, medium, or low. And then you have your roadblocks. So you'll see with the roadblock about creating videos, they need a Camtasia license. How can they make the videos if they don't have a Camtasia license? And then the note there was we're waiting to hear back.

[00:24:29] Jeni Balch: I tried it in something else, but we're still waiting to hear back. That way, at the end of the quarter, When you can come back and look at everything, you can see what got in your way or what worked successfully and what progress you're able to make overall as a team.