Inside the Labyrinth

As many of you enter a new fiscal quarter, we’ve been working hard to help you become more productive and efficient within Koan. Take a look at some of our new product features and improvements.

As a leader, it’s critical to understand that one of your main jobs is to ensure the panes of glass remain clean and clear. This “line of sight” is extremely important and allows people visibility into and through the business. This is true for your employees, as well as for your clients and customers.

At Koan, we’ve been fascinated with the emerging role of Chief of Staff. We recently conducted a survey with a large group of people in that role, and discovered some insightful information about how the role will evolve over time.

Running effective team meetings can be challenging. Presenters ramble, attendees get distracted, and the meetings end without clear action items or decisions. And for newly-remote teams, it’s all harder than ever. Meetings work best when the most important information is front-and-center. That’s why we’re announcing a new feature within Koan to power great goal review meetings: Presentation Mode. 

The economic and societal impacts of COVID-19 will be profound, and your business is likely already facing some incredibly difficult challenges. You’ll likely be running your next planning cycle (e.g. for Q2) as a remote team, perhaps for the first time. Instead of trying to replicate your existing in-person off-sites through Zoom, we recommend making some adjustments. And by the way, these changes will make your in-person planning sessions in the future better too.

At Koan we always seek to highlight the team building elements of our platform, but as remote workers become more isolated from their co-workers and society at large, we wanted to emphasize the importance of taking care of one another during this time of transition.

At Koan we’re finding the best way to move forward in this new reality is by supporting our customers and continuing to build tools to help teams do their best work. So today we’re announcing a free add-on for Koan to help our community to work better remotely: Daily Check-ins. 

Now more than ever, it’s critical to have a robust goals (OKRs) process to bring clarity and focus to your team. In this blog post, you’ll find the pragmatic advice that we’re offering our customers after having worked with hundreds of organizations to implement OKRs.