Our approach to
Turning a vision into an executable roadmap
After three years of delivering excellent work on time and on budget, a client for whom the founder of emHrge was the client executive turned to us for a much more strategic initiative: turning their bold mission and vision for the future of employee wellbeing — in the fullest sense of that word — across their global businesses into an executable roadmap.
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Question: Where and how should their team begin?
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Answer: Turn to their trusted partner for help.
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The opportunity before us
The global rewards team at this Fortune 100 company had indeed established a bold mission and vision, it even had a name for their initiative and a tagline to go along with it (both proprietary information). But what was missing were two critical components to success, one strategic and one tactical:
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Strategically, the team was not fully aligned around what the vision truly meant and what the desired future state would look like.
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Because the vision wasn't fully understand, its implications weren't fully understood and fleshed out, which in turn prevented the team from developing the roadmap.
We began by developing a strategy for gaining consensus and then developing the roadmap, reviewing it with the project sponsors. Following the discussion, the client added a unique element: While engaging the team's senior leaders was a must for the former, working with a group of "up-and-comers" for the later would bring forth a fresh perspective while providing a development opportunity for these individuals.
Once we'd agreed upon the approach, we set to work.
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To gain consensus among the senior leaders we interviewed each one. But rather than rely on a pre-determined set of questions, we instead presented to the leaders an illustrative communications announcing the "new state" to employees.
This method allowed us to uncover how each leader interpreted the vision and understood the implications through the feedback they provided on the communications. The rest of each interview was spent uncovering their perspectives about the vision, as well as their desired outcomes and concerns. ​
In this way, we were able to identify where the disconnects lay and subsequently shared this information with the entire team.
Next, we conducted two workshops with the up-and-comers, to:
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Share with them the now clearly articulated vision
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Identify the implications of that vision across various dimensions.
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Engage in creative brainstorming envisioning what the future state would look like.
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Brainstorm ideas regarding potential new programs and revisions to others that could bring about the envisioned future state.
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Prioritize the agreed-upon recommendations based on impact and achievability.
In our final deliverable, we summarized all of this work and developed the high-level roadmap, prioritizing the recommendations based on level of impact and ease of achievability.