“Help us change what it means to work in the advertising industry"

– The leadership team

ICF Next’s leadership team suspected their agency’s work hard/play hard culture was impacting their employees’ ability to do their best work.

After attending one of our culture change workshops, the team tasked us with helping them further identify changes they could make to their culture in order to make their people, and their clients happier.

We kicked off the project by interviewing each member of the leadership team about their hopes and fears for the project, and reviewing the results of an internal culture audit the team had recently conducted. 

Then, in order to hear from the entire agency, we turned a culture assessment we’d created previously into an anonymous culture survey. We gave the 130+ person agency two weeks to respond and ended up with an >80% completion rate. Using our context-based research framework, we mined the quantitative data for insights.

We presented these initial findings back to our clients, who responded with a lot of emphatic head nodding and anecdotes that supported the data. 

Once discovery was complete, we designed a new workshop as an extension of one the leadership team had originally attended which incorporated some new exercises based on everything we’d learned thus far.

The workshop was intense, and we were grateful to be working with such an engaged, committed team. 

In order to make strategic recommendations, we gathered up our interview notes, survey findings, and workshop insights and cross-referenced them with our decade of research into behavior change. 

The project already had a compelling theme that had been introduced by a member of the leadership team. Although we all liked the concept, there was concern that it already had some metaphorical baggage attached to it. 

We brainstormed alternatives and landed on “Disengage” – a campaign that was both a play on the agency’s name* and a cheeky nod to the notion that doing so is bad for business. This concept was easily understood and adopted by the whole agency.

*ICF Next was known as Olson Engage at that time

Throughout the project, our relationship with the leadership team was based on mutual trust. This allowed us to have candid, in-depth conversations about their culture, what might work, and what definitely wouldn’t.

Ultimately, our partnership led to reduced employee turnover, better client work and even some industry awards. We couldn’t have asked for better clients or a better result.

Experience

Strategy Director – BASIC®
Associate Strategy Director – Huge
Strategy Lead – Nelson Cash
Senior Strategist – Freelance
Organization Design Consultant – Habits at Work

Clients

The Tech, FICO, Indeed, All Raise, Mercari, Google Fiber, ICF Next, The Federal Reserve, Walmart

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