Why Chiefs of Staff Are Key to Business Strategy
The swift transition to a completely remote work environment has most people mourning the moments an office allowed: the quick questions, chatting with colleagues, team brainstorming sessions. Without the ability to recreate an in-person experience, companies are trying to find ways to adjust, keep communication open, and maintain a sense of unity. Who, in a business, is responsible for empowering their workforce with the proper digital tools and processes to make this adjustment easier, if not better? Chiefs of Staff.
A Chief of Staff is vital to a healthy company with cared-for employees. In today’s virtual, uncertain working climate, the most effective Chiefs of Staff assume the responsibility for channelling the engagement, values, and culture of an organization. They lead the organization in the execution of setting, tracking, and achieving its goals—making them one of the most integral decision-makers in the company.
In this moment of enormous change, Chiefs of Staff are great resources for CEOs to double-down on the value of leadership: the CEO sets audacious goals and takes responsibility for getting the company over the finish line. The Chief of Staff sets the strategy, identifies the proper tools to achieve success, and owns the company-wide execution.
LendingTree’s Lauren Pilon, Senior Director, Business Project Management Office, wanted to find a way to do just that—communicate leadership’s vision and ensure the rest of the company was aware and mobilized to execute the work. “With all of us working remote, betterworks allowed us to establish what our overall corporate strategy was throughout different areas of the organization. Betterworks allowed senior management to identify their overall key goals and gave us the ability for all levels to figure out how they ultimately were able to move the needle as it specifically related to their individual role.”
Ari Schapiro, Chief of Staff at Auth0, needed a solution to bring together a newly dispersed company. He used betterworks to set goals and share them companywide. “We had the opportunity to surface all the things our different teams were planning and thus make sure they were all aligned with the high-level purpose, the high-level plan.” The transparency the platform allowed was particularly crucial in this new, remote working world.
As companies seek to blend the benefits of distributed teams and the sense of “being in the office,” Chiefs of Staff can empower the C-Suite to choose a comprehensive digital platform, like betterworks, that offers a single solution for multiple company pain-points:
OKRs and goal alignment: Use OKRs to align your organization from the top to the bottom by transparently measuring objectives in one agile strategy execution platform. Deliver focused results by setting quarterly business objectives.
Employee engagement: Conduct employee pulse surveys and get real, tangible feedback from your team to identify opportunities for improvement. Build a more engaged company culture and see increases in areas such as profitability, retention, and overall productivity.
Continuous performance management: Keep your team engaged and motivated to achieve by having more frequent conversations around goal alignment. Give recognition to deserving team members and encourage great work to continue.
How and where we work has changed, demanding clearer communication, vision, and expectation-setting from leadership. While certainly a tall order, achieving agility and transparency from executives is still attainable thanks to people like Chiefs of Staff and tools like betterworks.