WorkBoard CEO Deidre Paknad sat down with Alexis Kearns, Chief People Officer at GHX, who shares her approach to OKRs and performance management, the hard conversations, team OKRs and effective managers, and the CEO-CHRO partnership. When Alexis stepped into HR leadership at GHX, she didn’t come from a traditional HR background — she came from strategic integration work in M&A. This unique perspective shaped her belief that people are a strategic competitive advantage, not just a support function. But GHX, like many organizations, faced significant challenges in adapting its people and performance systems to a faster, more interconnected, post-COVID business environment.
The Challenge
- Needed to improve growth rate but execution was slow
- Low understanding of priorities and a perception leaders “piled on” initiatives without understanding constraints
- 55 person MBRs that required 80 hours of preparation yet the CFO “still didn’t understand how the business was running”
- Cross-functional blind spots that were exacerbated as the pace of change and technology accelerated
The WorkBoardAI Solution
GHX tackled these challenges by tightly integrating its business strategy, OKR discipline, leadership model, and performance management into one cohesive system — all grounded in transparency and collaboration.
- CEO “can’t imagine running the business without WorkBoardAI –we would never be able to respond to external and internal drivers of change fast enough.”
- Saved $50k per business review by slashing prep andmeeting time and moving to digital business reviews.
- The highest engagement attributed is that 86% ofemployees understand the direction and how to contribute – addressing the primary pain point and freeing people to make fast, good decisions.
Conclusion
By implementing WorkBoardAI to operationalize GHX’s OKR cadence and leadership alignment, leader's improved cross-functional coordination and reduced preventable escalations by making interdependencies visible and enabling leaders to recalibrate key results and timing in real time. The company increased decision velocity by reducing repetitive context-setting and giving leadership—and the CEO— continuous visibility into priorities and progress. On the people side, GHX reported employee engagement feedback scores as “off the charts above benchmark,” which Alexis attributes to the systems and manager coaching that supported more regular, higher-quality feedback conversations.
