The book "The Third Retail Revolution" points out that the retail industry has experienced two revolutions in the past 50 years, the first is the chain store revolution initiated by Walmart, and the second is the e-commerce revolution initiated by Amazon. Today, digitalization is supporting the third revolution in retail – with new tools, new management, and the reconstruction of "people-goods-fields".
Multipoint Dmall was born in the wave of the third retail revolution. Founded in 2015, it provides digital solutions for supermarket chains, fresh stores, and convenience stores through the Dmall Retail United Cloud.
To help the industry to do digitalization, the R&D department is the technical base. In June 2021, Multipoint Dmall underwent an organizational restructuring and established the "Multipoint OS R&D Department" – one of the most core R&D departments of Multipoint. More than 400 R&D+ testers fully support multi-point SaaS solutions to boost digital innovation in the retail industry.
How high a business can jump depends on the ability of the organization to mobilize. But for a new team like a "multi-point OS R&D department", it is not easy to stimulate organizational mobilization: everyone comes from different teams, and the common goal perception is not clear enough; everyone is often independent, and the coordination needs to be improved; follow up the progress of the work, the efficiency of the meeting is not high, and the matter is not implemented to the people...
Standing on the cusp of industry digitalization, how does the multi-point OS R&D department enhance the mobilization of the organization?
Organizations do "1+1>2" things
In an organization, along with the hierarchy, there must be poor information.
For example, the boss assigns indicators downward, which is a process of increasing information differences. When a grassroots employee receives an indicator, he may have a series of questions in his heart: How is this indicator determined? How did this indicator pass on to me? What value do I want to realize behind receiving this indicator? ...... These questions are all poor information.
The boss might say: I don't care! What's wrong with poor information? The staff can do the job well.
Employees might say: Nothing! I usually don't think so much, the boss said what is it. That's it.
The boss holds the baton, and the employee obeys the order. Such a team often does not have a particularly amazing output. Why? Because everyone is staring at their own acres and acres of land, they don't say much hello to each other.
Peter Drucker wrote in The Practice of Management: "The enterprise must be able to produce more and better material products than the enterprise has. Enterprises must not become a mechanical collective of resources. The organization itself is to play the role of "1+1>2" and to exert greater value on the basis of combining resources.
The ideal organization is not 100 people ploughing their own land, but 100 people inventing better seeds and harvesters. The premise of achieving this is to eliminate the information gap as much as possible and connect everyone's goals.
There is no superior goal, no subordinate goal; no your goal, my goal, only our goal.
How to achieve information exchange? The multi-point answer is, with OKR, starting with goal setting.
"The more employees go to the grassroots level, the narrower their information channels are. We want to break the information gap so that grassroots employees can also understand the goals of the department and the goals of the boss. Zhang Lei, the second-level head of the multi-point OS R&D department, said.
In general, companies are more accustomed to allocating indicators from top to bottom; the choice of multiple points is to co-create goals. At the beginning of each quarter, more than 400 people in the department are doing one thing – opening OKR co-creation meetings.
The so-called "co-creation" is to gather the wisdom of the masses, rather than relying on the wisdom of one leader. Liu Pengfei, head of the multi-point OS R&D department, said that in the past, it was the OKR of his own department, which led to problems such as: 1) unable to cover everything, and would miss some work; 2) team members only "know what it is, do not know why it is so"; 3) drowned a lot of ideas and ideas.
Now, he uses the form of the OKR Co-Creation Association to develop the departmental OKR. Unlike regular meetings, co-creation throws everyone a question: If you're the head of a department, what do you think are the next few most important things? This is actually to allow every member, regardless of rank, to go through a thinking process of no. 1 position. Everyone extracts, discusses, votes, and produces OKRs from the department through keywords.
"OKR Co-creation, let's see each other." Zhao Yong, the third-level head of the multi-point OS R&D department, said that through the OKR co-creation meeting, he learned about the key work of other teams. "This window for learning and learning was not available before."
There are also unseen ideas that emerge from the bottom up. Zhang Lei, the second-level head of the multi-point OS R&D department, said that some employees proposed the goal of "system reconstruction" at the co-creation meeting, and after discussion together, they thought it was worth rising to the OKR of the department.
Then, each employee aligns the OKR of the department, and there is a target network within the organization in an instant. This transparent and open web sets up a fulcrum for collaboration.
"I used to only pay attention to one piece of my own work, but now I will take the initiative to look at okr up and down left and right through the network." Cheng Xilai, the third-level head of the multi-point OS R&D department, revealed that he did a thing to improve work efficiency by understanding the OKR of his colleagues in the department - algorithm interoperability. "My own team can provide algorithmic support for teams such as brands, merchandise systems, etc., and they have the right algorithms to provide to teams in need."
How to reject the "formalism" of meetings?
With the goal of co-creation, everyone needs to track progress in their work. This brings us to the most hated things for office workers – weekly meetings and weekly newspapers.
In many companies, the weekly meeting is like a black hole that devours efficiency: obviously it has been discussed for a long time, no effective conclusions have been drawn, and things have not been implemented; the weekly report is a kind of "workplace performance": colleagues write 2,000 words, I have to write 5,000 words, and I have to list my work in detail.
Such weekly meetings and weekly reports, do not grasp the key points, do not focus on the goal, not only waste time, employees have no growth.
So, multi-point has changed to a way of holding weekly meetings: based on OKR, meetings with documents.
Before the meeting, the head of the department inserted his own OKR in the Feishu document, invited subordinates to supplement the progress and card points in the KR; during the meeting, everyone first spent 15 minutes silently reading the document, commenting on the doubtful places, or mentioning their own ideas; then, commenting one by one, opening the discussion, so that the views fully collided; finally, the to-do list was clarified, and the relevant responsible person was @ .
After changing the way of meeting, Zhang Lei felt that the agenda of the meeting was more focused, and things were better promoted than before. "When I go through a document review, I will find that the comments in a certain place are very concentrated, and I can understand what everyone cares about most; after each meeting, I will determine a to do list, and the next meeting will pass last week's to do list, and many things can be pushed down." 」
Zhang Lei also found that after the meeting with the document, everyone's sense of participation was stronger. "In the past, when meetings were held, there were always two or three people speaking; now through document comments, everyone can express their inner voices, and there is no psychological burden."
At the end of a quarter, the same is true: based on departmental OKRs and documents, open in silent reading, and inspire and collide in discussions. Compared with the weekly meeting, the review meeting of the multi-point OS R&D department has added a "thematic sharing" link. "Everyone will share the real cases around them, which is a good process of collision and alignment of ideas." Liu Pengfei concluded.
Reviewing the knowledge accumulated in the document has opened everyone's horizons and pointed out the goals for the work in the next quarter. "I see different teams: front-end, store, app... When we all met, I suddenly realized that there were so many things to do." Cheng Xilai said that now he will carefully sort out the review documents with the team to learn from the excellent experience of other teams.
OKR + documents, changed to the form of meetings, but also everyone's way of thinking: meetings, not to report the past, but to lay the groundwork for the future.
Stimulate individual thinking
For many points, OKR is not only a landing tool for goals, but also a "mental gymnastics" for mobilizing everyone.
Zhao Yong mentioned that he was not very receptive to OKR at first. "The daily development needs can't be picked up, and there is no time to think of a lofty goal." But after several OKR cycles, he slowly grasped okr's thoughts. "Even if it is some daily chores, you can use the OKR framework to think about how to do better."
For example, when merchants encounter promotional activities such as double 11 and 618, they need to take turns on duty to deal with trivial IT needs. "There are only a few people in the R&D team, and if you are so immersed in it, everyone has to work overtime and stay up late."
For example, when some new colleagues join, they always ask repetitive business questions. "The fact that old employees answer these questions every day is also very laborious."
Therefore, Zhao Yong wrote "improving team efficiency" into his O, KR has two:
KR 1: Developed a data cleansing tool and delivered it to the implementation team to achieve 100% response to the IT needs of merchant activities
KR 2: Form a team [knowledge base] to solve at least 60% of repetitive Q&A
"Even if it's just solving these little problems, the whole team feels growth." Zhao Yong said that although difficulties will emerge in an endless stream, the team has learned to use OKR thinking to find solutions.
If you want to do a good job of "thought gymnastics" with OKR, you must need a good coach. Liu Pengfei, head of the multi-point OS R&D department, affirmed the "coaching" role of Feishu: not only providing tools, but also landing methods and practical guidance. "I used to want to push OKR, but there was no theoretical support, no tools to take advantage of, and no reference for good practice. The Feishu team actually helped us reduce the cost of trial and error. ”
Now, he sees a team of more than 400 people, integrating OKR into daily work, not only with a sense of direction, but also with more self-driving force. Everyone's actions and creativity, like grains of stars, lead the organization to climb high, "like a glimmer of light illuminating the glimmer." ”