How to define and track a career development plan in Salesforce using Axy OKR

A successful company promotes a work culture and creates an environment for its teams and individuals to develop professionally and personally while achieving its objectives.

This is not just a trend that is growing. It has now become a responsibility of the HR team to ensure that everyone across the company has a growth mindset and plan. 

Here are some numbers that show the importance of having a development plan implemented according to Forbes:

  1. Highly engaged teams show a 21% greater profitability.
  2. 89% of HR leaders agree that ongoing peer feedback and check-ins are key for successful outcomes.
  3. Employees who feel their voice is heard are 4.6 times more likely to feel empowered to perform their best work.
  4. 96% of employees believe showing empathy is an important way to advance employee retention.
  5. 87% of employees expect their employer to support them in balancing work and personal commitments

Source: forbes.com

The numbers speak for themselves. It is clear that your employees’ development is linked to your company’s success.  In short, the fulfillment of the company’s final objective is the sum of all the efforts and successes of each individual. This success is not only professional, it’s personal. That’s why you need to provide the correct tools and follow up to help in this career path.

Source: Wifiattendance

OKR’s on its way

As you know, using the objective and key results methodology across your company will help your business to grow in incredible ways. Focus needs to be on the personal engagement of your employees. Each employee has different abilities and tasks to perform, but what if they want to learn or do something different? This is when OKR’s are handy and you can use them to help them. OKR methodology requires C-Levels of the company to set a company goal. Career plans must be part of the objectives that help the company achieve its goal. Just to give you an example, a CEO would have an objective like: engage employees and increase loyalty with a Key Result like: individual career plan for 75% of employees.

This Objective, as you have read before, seeks to ensure employee engagement and therefore boost productivity throughout the entire organization, which ultimately helps achieve every objective. Remember the first part of OKRs is top-down, which means that there must be an objective for each manager like: Develop a career plan for the operations team with key results such as a career development plan for each employee. As for the third level, an employee would have an objective depending on the KR from his manager that would look something like a career development plan for the Director of digital customer success with specific key results like certification on AI-oriented solutions, 4 workshops of team coaching and complete 2 internal projects of efficiency in analytics.

Throughout the period, each employee will be assisted by his manager, and having honest conversations is key to make adjustments and identify additional support required from the organization. As each individual starts to see achievements on his personal career plan and goals it is likely his performance will improve as well therefore achieving his other OKRs. This practice helps create a culture where Career Paths and OKRs are valued and used as a tool to achieve professional and personal development.

Axy OKR

In Axy7 we are committed to the OKR’s best practices. Axy OKR will support career path development.

A career plan should follow the same structure of objectives and key results. It is important to note that the career plans must be linked to a higher level (organizational) goal. Usually, the CHRO would have a goal related to the completion of these plans. Keep it in mind because these new objectives ultimately must support in some way the company goal achievement. 

From a practical point of view with Axy OKR, you will have a single space to manage all goals, career, and business-oriented plans.

Here is how you do it in AXY OKR:

  • Start by asking your employees to create a personal development objective and set key results for that objective.
  • Execute your OKR’s. You can keep track of your employees progress by linking a Salesforce report and with weekly check in’s that will help you identify the progress achieved.
  • Our one on one module will allow you to have meaningful and organized conversations focused on the activities that will help your employee achieve his goals. 

  • Once the period is finished, wrapping up will be very easy as Axy OKR will create the one on one with talking points for you, and you will be able to score each objective and define the next steps with each employee.

With Axy OKR you can increase your employee engagement with a personalized career and development plan that boosts performance.

Remember that Axy OKR is free for 30 days so give it a try on appexchange!
Cheers
Axy Team