“Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.” (Simon Sinek)

It’s no secret that companies with clearly defined, consistent and compelling cultures tend to outperform those that don’t have them. People who work for a company will do better and be more productive and considerably happier when the culture is clear.

Leading personalized financial solutions company Advance America faced an interesting challenge in this area. While their customers value them greatly for the service they provide, the company had difficulty translating this value to its employees across the country, who had frequent turnover and a sense of disconnection from one another and the mission.

Recognizing the extreme importance of culture and internal communications, Advance America turned to BRIGHT+CO to create an employee engagement program that focused on gathering needed data, defining the desired culture and behaviors, identifying and attacking gaps and barriers, and creating a corporate-wide communications and training program designed to drive wide-spread employee buy-in to a culture that a culture that recognizes its service philosophy and rewards those who reinforce it.

Research

All great work is grounded in empirical evidence. So, we began with gathering meaningful benchmarking data. During this research phase we audited past employee satisfaction surveys, employee communications, conducted one-on-one interviews with leadership and held focus groups across the company with employees of different departments, levels of experience and locations. From these learnings, it became clear that employees did not understand what was powering the organization, and leadership lacked the tools to fully articulate the company’s vision and define motivators for employees to achieve pointed goals.

Definition and Implementation

As a result of our research, we defined the desired culture as collaborative, innovative, customer-centric and supportive. We implemented solutions for cultural issues, such as initiating an internal mantra and forming culture committees.

We developed an integrated employee engagement program to create a more systematic and programmatic approach to establishing a desired corporate culture and improving employee satisfaction and engagement. The program was implemented with the launch of a quarterly newsletter outlining upcoming initiatives, Advance America center success stories, and an internal communications program. We introduced quarterly leadership updates and launched a learning series within the succeeding 60 days and reviewed the strategic planning and goal setting systems and management training programs in the following 90 days and worked with senior leadership to make needed adjustments.

Evaluation

Recognizing the extreme importance of culture and internal communications, Advance America turned to BRIGHT+CO to create an employee engagement program that focused on gathering needed data, defining the desired culture and behaviors, identifying and attacking gaps and barriers, and creating a corporate-wide communications and training program designed to drive wide-spread employee buy-in to a culture that recognizes its service philosophy and rewards those who reinforce it.

Ready to evaluate and improve your employee culture? Contact us to set up a meeting.