redBus is one of the world's leading online travel platforms, founded in 2006. Operating across eight countries: India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Peru, Vietnam, Cambodia and Colombia, redBus serves millions of travellers through its bus ticketing, train booking, and hotel reservation services.
Over the past two decades, redBus has transformed how people plan their journeys, building a strong presence in the travel and mobility space. With a mission to connect people to their destinations, redBus continues to expand beyond buses into hotels and new mobility segments, including cabs, railways, and ferries.
Behind this growth is a culture built on transparency, accountability, and continuous improvement. redBus encourages employees to take ownership, develop their capabilities, and contribute to the organization's progress.
There is a very strong sense of accountability, transparency and openness. This is one of the places where we don't really see people having hidden agendas.
Divya AmarnathVP and Head-Human Resources, redBusChallenges: Lack of visibility into how broad KRAs translate into individual goals.
As redBus expanded into new geographies and business lines, keeping employees aligned with evolving organizational priorities became increasingly important. redBus set out to bring greater objectivity to goal-setting and help employees understand how their individual contributions connected to the bigger picture.
redBus began its goal-setting journey with a KRA-based approach before transitioning to OKRs to bring more clarity and objectivity to how goals were defined across the organization. As the process evolved, managing goals through Excel templates became increasingly difficult to sustain.
- Limited objectivity in goal-setting: The KRA-based approach needed to evolve to provide clearer, measurable objectives and individual key results.
- Disconnected goal management: redBus initially used Excel templates to manage OKRs, leaving organizational and individual goals spread across separate files.
- Lack of visibility across goals: Employees needed an easier way to view organizational and functional goals and understand how their individual contributions fit into the bigger picture.
- Fragmented progress tracking: Managing goals across spreadsheets made it difficult to connect individual check-ins with organizational progress.
- Limited visibility for leadership: Leaders needed a clearer view of whether goals were on track or falling behind.
Earlier there was a lack of synergy in the goals being set for the organization. Excel sheets were being maintained for the OKRs, and there was a disconnect there.
Aparajita MukherjeeHRBP - Tech & Product, redBusSolutions: Adopting OKRs to improve alignment and visibility across teams.
redBus partnered with Peoplebox to bring greater structure to its OKR process, connecting organizational objectives with individual goals and making progress easier to track across teams. Peoplebox enabled redBus to:
1. Cascade goals across levels: Connect organizational objectives to functional goals and individual key results (IKRs), with progress rolling up to parent goals.
2. Simplify progress tracking: Let employees update goals through manual check-ins, with integrations such as Jira available to automate progress updates where relevant.
3. Improve cross-team visibility: Give employees visibility into company and department goals, with configurable goal access.
4. Track goal health: Help leaders monitor goal progress and identify goals that were on track or falling behind.
5. Adapt to redBus's workflows: Configure goal cycles, alignment, visibility, and progress tracking to fit redBus's existing templates and processes.
When it comes to Peoplebox, they were not trying to give us an off-the-shelf tool, like a ready-made product. There was synergy, people could actually see how their individual effort adds up to organizational achievement.
Aparajita MukherjeeHRBP - Tech & Product, redBusResults: Driving greater transparency and accountability through OKRs.
As redBus expanded into new business lines and portfolios, Peoplebox brought greater objectivity to goal-setting. By cascading organizational goals down to individual key results, employees gained clearer direction on their priorities and how their contributions added up to the larger picture of the business.
Here's how this translated into measurable outcomes for redBus:
