Employees at Principal Financial Group use Microsoft Viva Goals to drive strategic alignment and enable business growth

For almost 145 years, Principal has provided investment, insurance, and retirement tools and resources to millions of customers around the globe. With a robust strategy in place, the company's goal-tracking was successful but experienced challenges mapping goals across the company. Principal needed a company-wide tool to track goals across its entire business portfolio consistently. Sharing the story of progress across leadership groups and aligning employees to a strategic vision is essential to continued company growth.

Tracking shared goal(s) through one looking glass

Historically, tracking progress against goals within business units was successful, but to do so across business units was a manual process. Principal required an organizational goal-setting and management solution. The company needed a single, secure repository of goals that connected a shared company vision across employees, business units, and leadership. 

For Principal, setting specific, measurable progress is fundamental to achieving priorities and identifying areas of improvement. Brett Guillory, Director of Enterprise Strategy, Innovation, and Capital Markets, emphasizes that “Shifting to Viva Goals to report strategy progress helped reinforce our shared goals. A process that once took up to 10 days now takes one to two days. We now manage progress updates as a group, versus back and forth through email threads with versioning challenges.”

In the past, Principal operated as three independent business units but now needed to integrate goals to seed future growth initiatives. Challenges arose as some leaders grew concerned about losing their decision-making autonomy as to what was most important. Viva Goals provided transparency into efforts across the enterprise, clearly showing where alignment across business units is vital for growth.

Principal moved from a “process focus” to an “outcome focus” with the use of objective and key results (OKRs). This move developed from a shift in how goals were tracked against completion. In Microsoft Viva Goals, the OKR framework helps to define business goals and align outcomes to business requirements. Changing to outcome-based goals has required a thoughtful approach to change management and stakeholder alignment and remains a journey in progress. 

Aligning different goals to one vision

Viva Goals’ seamless integration into Microsoft 365 allowed for use by stakeholders in daily workflows. Guillory emphasizes the company's relationship with Microsoft was equally pivotal in its evaluation of solutions. 

“Choosing a solution that integrated easily and felt familiar to our internal teams was incredibly important. Our business relationships and familiarity with Microsoft products would work seamlessly with Viva Goals and will continue building upon our goal-tracking capabilities. This was also one of the reasons we decided to expand Viva Goals beyond our internal group and extend it out more broadly within our company,” added Guillory.

With its current Microsoft 365 E3 license, the company purchased and deployed Viva Goals in a phased rollout. Teams across the company could align priorities to drive business success and consistently track goals across business units. This enterprise-wide effort has created ongoing transparency into the company's priorities, using Viva Goals to drive alignment. Guillory says, “Our mission is fostering a world where financial security is accessible to all. It’s imperative that as a global Fortune 500 company, employees sign on to this vision. With our robust business strategy, Viva Goals has helped create alignment across business units—increasing visibility and participation in planning. 

Principal began using Viva Goals with a small, internal pilot group of 1 team with 47 active users. The company soon expanded the phased pilot to 12 teams with 100 active users. Taking a measured approach—it started with the highest priority initiatives, then expanded the effort to teams that were tasked with business unit–specific priorities. Almost immediately, employee participants saw a clear opportunity to link business unit–specific strategy to enterprise-wide initiatives. And in turn, business risks and dependencies were more quickly identified. Guillory says the company equally values the integration of Microsoft products and continuous product enhancements.