Case Studies
Our clients are ambitious leaders who want to make their companies even better. We team up with each to build culture-driven strategies that excite their communities, inside and out.
CLIENT: BONTERRA | PROJECT: VALUES AND ACTIVATION
How Creating New Values Strengthened a High-Risk M&A Deal
WHAT THEY ASKED FOR
Before Bonterra had a name, the new company—a merger of four organizations—asked Great Mondays to guide the creation of new values and corresponding employee retention strategies. The risk involved in bringing together this many companies is the ultimate case for investing in values; the process and outcome can bring employees together during enormous change improving the odds of its success.
WHAT WE DID
We started by talking with senior leaders and external stakeholders to understand Bonterra's vision. At our request, the executive leadership team nominated 18 culture ambassadors from across the organization to ensure an authentic, employee-created values process. We hosted a series of workshops to understand their concerns and utilize the collective intelligence of these high performers. Together, we then identified behaviors that could embody and enable Bonterra's purpose. By the end, our project ambassadors along with company leaders arrived at four unique values and a unified corporate culture.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
Four standout ambassadors introduced the new culture framework at an all-hands meeting. Each selected one of the four new values to present with a personal story about its significance to them. But how would values guide their behaviors? They found out a few days later when the Supreme Court of the U.S. overturned Roe v. Wade. Bonterra's CEO released a response about how they will continue to advocate with one of their core values—cultivate inclusivity—in mind. That is the power of values to guide behaviors.
SECRET WEAPON
One of Terilyn Juarez Monroe's first initiatives as Bonterra’s Chief People Officer was to develop a strategy to unify the disparate employees behind a new single brand. Great Mondays had teamed up with her at a previous company. As our client-side partner, Terilyn aligned key leaders and welcomed influential employees as culture ambassadors to foster a values-driven culture.
“Our values were created in the context of our purpose and our brand, and are powerful reminders of what makes us special. I am so proud of our Culture Ambassadors and their work to help Bonterra create the most inspired culture. Because of this great work, we now have four values that stretch across the end-to-end employee experience and are infused throughout our talent processes.”
—Terilyn Juarez Monroe,
Chief People Officer
CLIENT: DC PUBLIC LIBRARY | PROJECT: CULTURE DESIGN AND ACTIVATION
What is the purpose of a modern library?
WHAT THEY ASKED FOR
After a talent management evaluation found that among the library's top opportunities for change were a reimagined purpose and clearly defined values, leadership reached out to Great Mondays to help create a new culture platform to re-engage staff and connect more deeply with its customers, the citizens of D.C.
WHAT WE DID
In collaboration with a team of culture ambassadors at DCPL and their leadership team, we identified the library's reason for being and created a purpose statement. Next, the ambassadors helped us home in on five characteristics deemed essential to acting on this new purpose. Bonus! We discovered the values became a hierarchy of commitments: to themselves, their team, organization, customer, and finally to the community of D.C.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
With fresh content and an updated purpose, we created assets and training tools to help leaders across the organization articulate the behaviors that the staff should stretch towards. These priorities expressed through the values help employees make culturally-aligned decisions. We designed, produced, and launched the new culture through an in-person day long leadership training session, we call a Culture Lab.
SECRET WEAPON
Our team of culture ambassadors worked with us throughout the project. They represented the employees voices and shared their ideas during the launch with the entire senior leadership bolsetering credibility and buy-in.
CLIENT: PAGERDUTY | PROJECT: EMPLOYER VALUE PROPOSITION AND PLAY BOOK
Who will build the future of your company?
WHAT THEY ASKED FOR
We partnered with PagerDuty to establish their employer value proposition (EVP) to drive talent attraction, engagement, and retention. With a heavy focus on engineering and sales candidates and a rapidly growing headcount the people team expressed that their message to current and future Dutonians (employees) should be inclusive, inspiring, and done ASAP.
WHAT WE DID
Together with the talent brand team we developed a story and messaging architecture that illustrates PagerDuty’s unique offer to Dutonians. Through our interactive research process: executive conversations, leadership workshops, and document deep dive, Great Mondays revealed vital insights into PagerDuty’s culture and talent vision.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
Great Mondays developed an EVP play book to empower recruiters, hiring managers, and senior leaders at PagerDuty to leverage the new story and messaging architecture in an authentic and compelling way. The EVP play book translates research and strategy into customer-facing copy for everything from a LinkedIn advertisement to a candidate pitch, to web copy for the careers page.
SECRET WEAPON
Just a few weeks after she joined PagerDuty our client-side partner, Jasmine Ward, jumped right in to help lead this initiative. She wasted no time in engaging Great Mondays in the EVP rollout phase as a way to excite and align key leaders at PagerDuty with a new story.
CLIENT: SNAG | PROJECT: VALUES REFRESH
How do you capture many different voices with just four values?
WHAT THEY ASKED FOR
Snag asked us to take a look at their core values. Their HR team wanted to update their culture with a set of beliefs that reflected who they had become, and could be actionable in performance reviews, and sharper in a way that would attract more of the right people or Snaggers as they call themselves.
WHAT WE DID
Under a tight deadline we heard from executives, worked with a set of hand-picked culture All-Stars, and dug into all the research we could find. We took all this input and worked closely with their HR team (Snagger Services), to create a new set of values that defined a compelling internal brand, highlighted the most important behaviors, and helped everyone track their progress and improvement.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
Snag launched this new set of internal and external-facing core values at their annual company kick off along side their new brand. (An excellent strategy, if we do say so ourselves.) Wasting no time to put these to work they began rolling these out the very next day. We’re very proud of our partnership that aligned two voices for three audiences into four values.
SECRET WEAPON
The amazing can-do can’t-stop Candace Nicolls. Our client-side partner in this endeavor made every effort to keep things on the inside organized and moving forward at an unbelievable pace. We love ambitious clients like her.
“It’s no small accomplishment driving agreement across all the different stakeholders. To have done this, in the timeframe we set out, and ending with both the essence and branding that we can all feel really proud of is huge! You lived the values in bringing ours to life. After all it took; fire, unconvention, candor and above all solidarity to make these real!”
—Peter Harrison, CEO
CLIENT: PROPOSITION CHICKEN | PROJECT: PURPOSE AND VALUES
How do you put culture at the heart of operations?
WHAT THEY ASKED FOR
No matter how tasty, chicken won’t change the world. But a chicken restaurant can make life better with delicious food, warm service for everyone, and jobs that are more than a paycheck. With this mission in mind, Proposition Chicken asked us to help them codify their values and design ways to keep them at the heart of everything they do as they expand into new stores.
WHAT WE DID
Over two full-day working sessions, we helped the Prop C management team develop a purpose statement and values that captured the heart of the owner’s vision and even won over their team’s skeptic. To make them usable every day, we created simple, fun wall graphics and collateral that make their culture visible and accessible, nudging staff and management alike to reconnect daily with what matters most.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
The management team continues to integrate their culture work into everything they do: From learning to spot culture fit in new hires for their newest location in downtown Oakland to teaching the store manager Spanish, the Prop C team gets better every day at living their values.
SECRET WEAPON
Leaders need to be aligned, even if it takes locking them in a room together. Don't worry, we let them out eventually.
CLIENT: ADAPTIVE PATH | PROJECT: PURPOSE
How do you reorient towards a new north star?
WHAT THEY ASKED FOR
Adaptive Path was a pioneer in user experience design and had been a leading digital agency for a decade. But UX had become common, pitting them against new competitors and leaving them without clear differentiation or focus. It was time to redefine why they were in business so they could shape their future.
WHAT WE DID
They had a large group of strong-minded founders, so success relied on bringing all of them together. We spent time talking to stakeholders and clients, evaluating their story, market, and services. What became clear is that what felt like a grab-bag of offerings had a strong common thread: great human experiences.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
With that north star to rally around, everyone in the company felt reenergized and realigned. This strong sense of purpose continues to guide them through all their work and transitions, including a high-profile acquisition by Capital One.
SECRET WEAPON
A mystery was why their efforts to scale had faltered. In our analysis we reached one of those moments where the answer is blindingly obvious once you see it: Trying to scale from the inside was pushing uphill. But their outside community was eager and engaged — all they had to do was tap into that energy and new opportunities flooded in.
Josh guided us through what was the hardest and most important work of the year — carving out who we are, what we believe in, and what that means for the future. Would I hire him again? Absolutely, without a doubt.
—Brandon Schauer, Head of Enterprise Design
CLIENT: CREDIT KARMA | PROJECT: VALUES
How do you scale a great culture?
WHAT THEY ASKED FOR
When you’re a small company, your values are often implicitly understood. As you get bigger, it becomes necessary to put your values on paper so they’re visible to an expanding team. Credit Karma, a personal finance company, was known for having a kick-ass culture but was starting to get off track and wanted a framework to ensure they could hire and reward for the right things.
WHAT WE DID
It’s never as easy as just writing the values down. We spent time in working sessions and interviews with their people to get a feel for what made them special, where the business was going, and how values could support their goals. Through our work with their leadership team, we landed on a new purpose statement and a tight set of 4 values, then performed gap analysis and created an action plan.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
The analysis and recommendations revealed to the executive team where they weren’t delivering on their desired culture and values. With this understanding, they could enter the next phase of their business aligned and aware of the truths that would guide them forward.
SECRET WEAPON
Central to our strategy was collaborating with influential employees we call culture ambassadors. They were our truth tellers, providing a reality check on ideas and gaps, as well as ambassadors who would facilitate internal adoption.