Svea Solar uses Microsoft Viva Goals to power more achievement and efficiency

Expanding OKRs to new business areas and improving engagement

Since Svea Solar was founded in 2013, the company has grown from 2 to 1,200 employees, and its operations now span a total of five markets: Spain, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany. That rapid growth is a testament to Svea Solar’s success, yet it also made it hard for the company to communicate organizational goals and create a cohesive vision. “In the past, we communicated OKRs only with certain areas of the business,” recalls Kugelberg. And those OKRs often were documented in PowerPoint slides stored in a SharePoint site. Employees had to know about and search for OKRs to understand how their daily work affected the company’s objectives. He continues, “It was cumbersome to keep track of OKRs, and it took a lot of time for people to find the information they were looking for.” 

By introducing Viva Goals, Svea Solar expanded the use of OKRs and simplified communication. “When we launched Viva Goals, we wanted to use OKRs more broadly within all the functions,” says Kugelberg. Sharing OKRs and Viva Goals with more business functions proved to be a seamless process. “First, we traveled around to different offices and held workshops on developing OKRs, and then we introduced Viva Goals to complement the OKR teachings we’d already done,” explains Kugelberg. Svea Solar used digital trainings to ensure that everyone knew how to use Viva Goals. He notes, “The transition was very smooth because everyone already uses the Microsoft Teams platform to do their work. Adding Viva Goals to a familiar environment made it much easier for the whole company to adopt the OKR framework.” The compatibility of Viva Goals with the Teams platform also simplified deployment. “The fact that we didn’t need to import all the users to a new platform really saved us a lot of time,” he adds. 

The move to Viva Goals is already improving overall employee engagement with OKRs. “We no longer need to search for a document that contains the latest OKRs because Viva Goals has our up-to-date numbers and objectives,” says Kugelberg. “Using Viva Goals to keep our objectives front and center is really inspiring for people. It makes our progress more transparent for everyone.”

Encouraging new, more agile ways of working, shaving months off timelines

Today, monthly team meetings start with Viva Goals and the team reviewing its progress toward specific OKRs. It’s a big change from intermittent, often self-directed OKR updates. “It used to be a big undertaking to get the status of each objective updated,” says Kugelberg. “Checking in is much easier now with Viva Goals.” Each team uses its monthly OKR check-ins to review progress, discuss any potential roadblocks, and strategize about ways to work through those.

The company also used Viva Goals to prompt the shift to prioritizing quarterly sprints over yearly objectives. “We encourage more agile ways of working now, so people can stay focused on what really matters,” says Kugelberg. “We find we’re stretching the organization and achieving more by creating a common understanding of what we want to achieve and by when. For example, we made quick progress and rolled out new ways of working to increase installation efficiency and safety—several months ahead of schedule.”

Svea Solar has tied other Microsoft applications and external data sources in with the Viva Goals experience to further streamline how employees track their progress toward OKRs. “We’ve made it much easier for employees to check in on the status of their OKRs by pulling in different data sources, including Salesforce, Microsoft Planner, Excel Online, and Microsoft Power BI,” says Kugelberg. Incorporating all that data helps ensure that OKRs stay up to date. Connecting Viva Goals to Planner is proving to be especially useful. “Combining data from Planner and other tools in Viva Goals gives us the latest information on which tasks are done and which are lagging behind and relates it all back to the company’s objectives,” Kugelberg adds.

Improving employee experiences and bringing organizational goals down to earth

By creating a unified platform where the whole company can align on OKRs, Svea Solar makes it quicker and easier for new hires to understand what they need to do and why. “One thing that surprised me about Viva Goals is just how much our recently hired employees appreciate the tool,” says Kugelberg. “It’s a really simple way for employees to get a view of what we as a company want to achieve and to narrow down those objectives by functions.” In the past, gaining that insight came with time and experience. He continues, “We use Viva Goals to demystify what’s important for each function and get people up to speed faster.”

Even for established employees, using Viva Goals helps improve their daily work experience and cut down on extraneous tasks. “Employees feel they get more done when they focus on the right things,” says Kugelberg.

Staying aligned on the company’s founding purpose

In addition to promoting strategies that will help the business continue to grow, Svea Solar uses Viva Goals to keep employees connected to the company’s founding purpose—reducing carbon emissions. “We wanted to make clear with our OKR effort that every one of our goals, from increasing marketing efforts to improving installation efficiency, ties back to our core mission of reducing carbon emissions,” says Kugelberg. “We use Viva Goals to give everyone insight into what we call our ‘Halo OKR,’ which shows how many megatons of CO2 we’ve helped customers avoid producing by installing our Svea Solar systems. That drives a lot of engagement and creates a shared purpose at every level of the company.” As Svea Solar adds new employees and expands operations, aligning on common goals will be more important than ever. The company now has the tools to scale its OKR effort and achieve more.

Find out more about Svea Solar on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn.