8) Viva Goals is Working for Our Organization

Like many organizations, ours does annual goalsetting. This year we started a little bit earlier. In July, we began a series of listening sessions in many (we hoped for all but, speaking of goals, we didn’t quite accomplish our goal) of Team Expansion’s 140 working/training locations around the world. (We used a series of short videos to guide our teams through prayer and input sessions. They took notes and uploaded the notes to a special website, giving them voice in the process.) (Click “Read More” to see how it worked.) By the time we reached November, our Leadership Team had a broad set of inputs to consider. We considered every input carefully and forged a slate of visionary goals to propose to our Board of Directors, who met the week following our Leadership Team. Based on the outputs from the Board, we fashioned “big rock” goals in Microsoft Viva Goals then asked our Field Coordinators, Team Leaders, and field workers around the world to shape “OKRA” goals in alignment to those primary objectives. (We set OKRA to stand for Objectives, Key Results, and Actions.) Many used Viva Goals directly. Others just wrote their goals in a spreadsheet or document, then allowed us to input the goals into Viva for them. Either way, we’re thinking that Viva Goals will be at the center of our prompting process throughout 2025. We’ll let you know how it goes throughout the year. (For those with a non-profit grant from Microsoft, Viva Goals costs around $1.50 per employee per month.) Learn more about Viva Goals at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/introducing-microsoft-viva-goals-bd651be7-472a-4f40-8fdd-6fcead79f3ad.)