From company strategy to goals for 11,000 employees

We connected a large international mining group’s strategy with the work of more than 11,000 employees. The system we built traces the path from a group priority down to a production target at an individual site, and back again. Managers see whose results will contribute to their own targets, while employees understand what is expected of them and why it matters to the business.

The client and its consultants developed the methodology; we turned it into a working tool for 30 group companies, combining OKRs – objectives and key results – with KPIs, plan approvals and bonus calculations.

Where did my goal come from?

Several layers of management stand between group strategy and an employee’s personal plan. At each level, a broad goal becomes a more specific commitment. The longer that chain, the harder it is to understand why someone has a particular target, or whether individual plans add up to the overall result.

We built a connected tree of goals with checks between levels. A manager breaks a target down into goals for their team, and the system checks that they align with the parent goal. Employees see the part of the tree available to them and follow the link from their own target to a department goal and a strategic priority. A mining or production target gains a clear purpose in the wider business.

Success is defined in advance, with three levels for each goal: an acceptable minimum, the planned result and a stretch target. Goals also carry weights, so the assessment reflects both how well a goal was met and how much it matters.

Employees take part in setting their goals: clarifying the wording, proposing changes and agreeing them with their manager. We built in comments and a change history so that, when review time comes, both sides have a record of what they agreed.

Employees see where their goals come from. Managers see whose results will help them meet their own.

One project, different managers

In a cross-functional project, the project manager owns the outcome, but department heads also allocate the participants’ time. Project goals need agreement from both sides: what each person will deliver and what resources they have to do it.

We built this division of responsibility into OKR projects. The manager brings together people from different departments, who define their key results. Then the project manager approves the results to be delivered, while the line manager approves the time and resources. Both agreements stay with the employee’s goal in the same system. Large projects can be divided into subprojects, each with its own participants and results linked to the overall plan.

From goals to bonuses

Under the client’s incentive scheme, bonuses depend on both individual and company performance. We made the calculation transparent: agreed goals, their weights and performance ratings sit in one system, so employees and managers understand how the bonus is determined.

Employees submit results, managers review and approve them, and some figures arrive automatically from other business systems. We implemented bonus calculations using this data and connected them to payroll, making the process traceable from an agreed target to a bonus payment.

The review also informs the next step: which skills to develop for more demanding goals. We brought together self-assessment, manager assessment, personal development plans and an LMS with online courses, all using the same employee data. People plan their development and access training in the same environment where they work with their goals.

Keeping up with 30 companies

Appointments, transfers and departures affect who approves goals, reviews results and has access to employee data. Maintaining those relationships manually across 30 companies would mean repeating HR’s work in every module.

We integrated the platform with SAP and Active Directory so that changes flow automatically into the related processes. Daily synchronisation updates employee records, departments and reporting lines; the goals, assessment and learning modules use that shared structure for approvals and access rights. The platform keeps up with organisational changes without a separate manual record.

Over several years, we turned the first goal-setting module into an HR platform for a geographically distributed group, adapting it as management practices changed. We added shared OKR projects, bonus calculations, assessment and learning to a system already used by thousands of employees.