This story will resonate if…

• Your sustainability targets live in one report and your operations targets live in another — and nobody’s connecting them
• You’ve sat in a post-mortem and found out two business units had been building the same thing in parallel
• Pulling together a quarterly strategy review takes weeks of chasing people, not minutes of checking a screen
• A non-exec asked which active projects connect to your long-term targets — and the room went quiet for a moment too long

The challenge

Their strategy wasn’t wrong. It just kept getting lost on the way down.

If you walked through the head office on a Tuesday afternoon, you’d hear one company. Slide decks about low-carbon portfolios. Bio-based feedstocks. Sustainability commitments repeated in three different meetings before lunch. If you stood in a plant control room that same afternoon, you’d hear a completely different one. Throughput. Yield. The maintenance window that got pushed again.

Same company. Two languages. Neither side was wrong.

The executive floor had built sustainability into the spine of the strategy — real targets, tied to bonus pools, mentioned by name on investor calls. The plants were running on something else entirely: throughput, yield, safety, a maintenance schedule that didn’t bend for anyone. When sustainability targets came down from the centre, they showed up as bullet points in a deck. Important-sounding, sure. But not connected to anything anyone was being measured on this week.

• A business unit would commit to a meaningful emissions reduction in its quarterly plan. The actual levers — process changes, feedstock swaps, energy contracts — sat with engineering teams whose own goals didn’t mention emissions at all. The work happened in fits and starts, when someone senior remembered to ask.
• Different product lines were independently developing bio-based replacements for similar inputs — different teams, different timelines, different vendors, budgets approved separately. Neither team knew the other existed until R&D leadership found out almost by accident at an offsite.
• When a major customer shifted procurement criteria mid-year — demanding lifecycle carbon data on every SKU — the response chain took most of a quarter to align. By the time sales, technical, and sustainability were rowing in the same direction, the customer was already talking to someone else.
• Every quarterly business review, the strategy team spent close to three weeks pulling status updates by email. By the time the deck hit the conference room, half the numbers were weeks out of date. People stopped trusting the data. They trusted whoever spoke last.

They’d tried the usual fixes — a separate sustainability scorecard, monthly steering meetings, a shared SharePoint that nobody opened. Each moved the needle a little. None of them held. The problem wasn’t that the strategy was bad. It was that there was no reliable way for it to travel — and no single place where you could see, in real time, whether it had arrived.

The solution

They looked at several platforms. Most cracked at the plant boundary. One didn’t.

The evaluation had one question that cut through everything else quickly: can this handle an org that goes all the way down to a shift supervisor on a plant floor?

Most platforms looked fine at the top. Goals cascaded neatly from company level to division level. But push further — into site leads, shift managers, individual contributors at the bottom of a multi-layer structure — and things started to fall apart. Goals would technically be “linked” but in practice become disconnected from anything real. A plant manager would have an OKR that nominally traced back to a company priority, but the thread was too thin to follow. Nobody believed in it.

Profit.co held the cascade at every level. Operations leaders could set OKRs in the same system, in the language their teams already used — yield, downtime, energy intensity per tonne — and those goals traced back, visibly and in real time, to the corporate sustainability objectives at the top. The link wasn’t a translation. It was the same record, viewed from a different altitude. That was the decision. Everything else followed from it.

How the OKR programme actually runs

Platform integration

OKRs don’t live in isolation. Here’s how they connect the whole platform.

The OKR module is the strategic backbone of Profit.co. But its real power isn’t just goal-setting — it’s what happens when OKRs connect to the projects executing against them and the people being evaluated on delivering them. Here’s how this organisation uses all three together.

The results

A few cycles in, something had changed. Not just in the numbers — in the room.

A few cycles after rollout, the people running the programme noticed something they hadn’t fully anticipated. The operational metrics were moving — check-in rates up, reporting time down, pivots landing faster. But the bigger shift was harder to measure.

Sustainability had stopped being a separate conversation. It wasn’t that anyone had become more committed — the commitment was always there. What changed was that the conversation finally had somewhere to live. A plant manager reviewing the week’s output could see, on the same screen, where they stood against an emissions intensity target. The connection stopped being something people had to take on faith.

That’s the thing about visibility at scale. Once people can actually see how their work connects to everything else, they start behaving differently. Not because they’re told to. Just because they can.