In this episode, Alexandra Malak, VP HR People Innovation & Digital Transformation at Renault Group, shares how Renault approached enterprise transformation during a period of significant business disruption, including COVID-related impacts and semiconductor shortages. She explains how the company’s CEO-led strategic plan—structured around three phases, Resurrection, Renovation, and Revolution—created urgency for clearer execution and alignment across a global workforce of 170,000 employees. Alexandra discusses why Renault adopted OKRs as a strategic execution framework, how HR was entrusted to lead OKR adoption at the team level, and how WorkBoardAI enabled transparency, alignment, and faster execution across brands, regions, and functions. The conversation also explores HR’s evolving role in driving business outcomes, cultural transformation, and collective agility by embedding OKRs into daily work and decision-making.
The Challenge
- Fragmented strategic understanding during crisis and transformation:
Renault Group was navigating severe business disruption (COVID, semiconductor shortages, financial pressure) while simultaneously launching a multi-year strategic plan, making it difficult for teams to clearly understand and internalize long-term direction while executing short-term survival priorities.
- Lack of shared priorities across a large, global, siloed organization:
With 170,000 employees across 39 countries, functions, brands, and regions often worked in silos, limiting visibility into what other teams were prioritizing and creating friction in cross-brand and cross-functional alignment.
- Overreliance on KPIs without a clear execution framework for transformation:
Engineering-driven teams were highly accustomed to KPIs focused on operational health, but lacked a structured way to translate strategic ambition and transformation goals into actionable, aligned execution steps.
- Limited transparency into team-level work and people priorities:
HR and business leaders lacked real-time insight into what teams were actually working on, where friction points existed, and which people or organizational topics needed prioritization—often discovering issues too late or indirectly.
The WorkBoardAI Solution
- Clear execution of strategy through aligned, team-level OKRs:
WorkBoard enabled Renault Group to translate its strategic plan into focused, team-level objectives, helping teams stay aligned on near-term execution while keeping long-term transformation goals visible.
- Significant time savings through live, organization-wide transparency:
Teams gained instant visibility into each other’s priorities, reducing the need for alignment meetings and enabling faster decision-making—particularly critical in a large, multi-brand enterprise.
- Stronger HR impact on business performance and transformation:
HR gained direct insight into business priorities, friction points, and organizational needs, allowing HR leaders to better support strategy execution, improve business acumen, and influence outcomes beyond individual performance management.
- Acceleration of cultural and organizational transformation
WorkBoard’s transparency and shared OKRs helped break down silos between corporate, brands, and countries, fostering collaboration, collective agility, and a culture of alignment and accountability.
Conclusion
Within the first year of adopting WorkBoardAI to support OKR execution, Renault Group enabled strategic alignment across a global organization of approximately 170,000 employees operating in 39 countries. Teams gained real-time visibility into priorities across brands and functions, allowing them to align work instantly—often during live sessions—without additional meetings. This transparency materially reduced coordination overhead in a highly complex, siloed environment and accelerated execution speed during a critical multi-year transformation phase extending to 2025. HR leaders also gained continuous insight into team priorities and organizational friction points, strengthening their ability to directly support business execution, cultural transformation, and enterprise-wide agility during a period of operational recovery and strategic renewal.
