About LichtBlick
"Energy from another star: the sun.”
900 employees | 1.7 million people served | 1.37 billion euros in revenue
LichtBlick is the leading green energy provider in Germany. The company, which is part of the Dutch energy transition pioneer Eneco, offers its customers climate-neutral energy solutions for at home and on the move.
LichtBlick is driving the future of energy by investing in innovative technologies and services such as the StromWallet, which networks decentralized energy sources. With revenues in the billions, the company underscores its commitment to actively shaping the energy transition and pursuing the goal of climate neutrality.
%201.webp)
The challenge
Lack of strategic alignment and transparency
Before implementing a unified strategy execution process, LichtBlick faced several challenges that hindered its ability to efficiently achieve its goals:
Alignment
Communication between departments was often unstructured and infrequent. As a result, the need for support between teams was not communicated in a timely manner, leading to blockages due to lack of capacity.
Transparency & Communication
A rudimentary strategy and a lack of clarity about current priorities often left employees in the dark about the company's goals. As a result, teams often did not know how their projects could contribute to the company's success.
Lack of focus
A large number of priorities were often pursued simultaneously or changed in a short period of time. This made it difficult to focus on the most important priorities.
Accountability
There was a lack of clear responsibility and accountability for achieving goals and implementing actions. As a result, projects were often not completed or lost sight of.
In the past, projects were often started without considering which teams would be needed and whether they would be able to provide support. This led to repeated stalls because there were no agreements and the required teams did not have free capacity.
Thomas Rahn, OKR Lead at LichtBlick
Before OKR or Workpath, LichtBlick worked on strategy on an ad hoc basis. There was no framework to address the challenges in a structured way. A committee met once a year and developed annual goals. In the course of the year, LichtBlick often lost sight of these goals, as further communication within the company did not consistently refer to them. In addition, there was a lack of uniform cascading and coordination within the teams in order to implement them in a structured manner.
The solution
The implementation of an effective strategy execution process at LichtBlick
The implementation began in the IT department, which initially experimented with Kanban. In 2018, the department then introduced OKR, initially on a trial basis for two quarters, and achieved positive results.
However, this approach was initially met with reservations in other departments, as IT's OKR-centric priorities led to requests from other departments being deprioritized and thus blocked. This highlighted the need for a company-wide implementation of the framework. Eventually, the conviction of some managers about the benefits of OKRs led to a company-wide rollout in the summer of 2019.
The decision for Workpath
On the IT side, it became clear during the testing phase that the use of specialized tools was necessary for a successful and scalable implementation. PowerPoint was used, but it was too maintenance-intensive and non-transparent. Different versions with different update statuses made the OKR process much more difficult. It was decided to use Workpath from the start to ensure the best possible communication and transparency.
OKR-Rollout
The decision in favor of the OKRs was made in June 2019, and LichtBlick started with half of all teams in September of the same year. All teams were then integrated in the following quarter. LichtBlick's approach to the company-wide OKR rollout was as follows:
1. First, an internal Program Lead Office of 4 people was formed
This group was tasked with overseeing and driving the rollout. Workpath's OKR Masterclass was used to provide intensive training for these leaders.
2. The next step was to train internal OKR coaches.
Each team was to have an OKR coach and each coach was to coach a maximum of 2 teams. This group was also trained using Workpath's OKR Masterclass.
3. OKRs were then rolled out to teams
At first, the OKR framework was rolled out to teams that had an affinity for the framework or experience with it, such as IT.
4. The other teams followed a quarter later.
In general, the framework was enthusiastically adopted by the teams as it helped them recognize their contribution to the strategy and improved communication and transparency around the issue.
