Customer Story
Winning Hearts and Minds: Investing in Transformative Growth Cultures
When a customer-obsessed consulting agency builds people-centric strategies into their brand it transforms the culture.
Mission
Make business more human.
The Challenge
The People & Operations Team at C Space combines the advantage of centralizing learning with a refreshed approach to performance management to transform their learning culture and to encourage and empower their people to take control of their own personal and career development.
Transforming the Employee Experience:
C Space’s Journey
C Space is a Customer Agency that takes a truly ‘outside in’ approach to research, consulting and advertising, by integrating customers into the ways their clients work. By bringing stakeholders together around the customer, they create greater clarity and alignment in the actions that will most effectively drive growth for their 200+ clients around the world. Their mission is to make business more human, and they aspire to ensure they live this mission internally as well as with their clients.
As a company, we have a few different strategic priorities, but an important one centers on building a learning culture. As we move from who we were to who we want to be, we need all of our people to be able to adapt to change. We need them to be constantly learning and have a growth mindset. We hope that Bridge can help us tie those components together. We’re focused on disrupting the world of consulting, research, and advertising. If we're going to be disruptive, we need to start with ourselves and do things differently.-Phil Burgess, Chief People & Operations Officer
As Phil and his team create the framework for a people-centric culture of development, channeled through Bridge,
A Few Pillars of Focus Surface to the Top:
- Empowering people to own their development path
“I’m looking to drive a shift in the way we have traditionally approached people development.. For example, our annual performance review process… It’s historically been completed once a year. We wanted to shift it to better suit the needs of our people who want feedback all year round, where our people have on-going conversations with their managers about their development. I’m excited that Bridge supports our efforts to connect training courses with development conversations between people and their managers.” - Kindling internal value
“We’re commissioned to disrupt the way our clients think. To do this, our clients are sourcing our greatest asset – our people. We need to figure out how to unlock the potential of our people to ensure they’re able to bring their best to our clients. That’s important for our clients and it’s important for people who work for us if they’re to feel engaged. Every day, we need to figure out how to do more with the talent we have by increasing their engagement, productivity, and skills. We’re trying to think about how we make our core learning culture more of an external competitive advantage, a value proposition, in the market so clients and future C Spacers are compelled to seek us out and work with us.” - Ensuring ‘learning culture’ is owned by the whole business, not just the People & Operations Team
“Shifting towards a learning culture means we need to help people in our business understand that everyone has a role to play in building a culture of learning. It can’t all sit with HR or L&D. Bridge is a supporting component in making that happen.” - CREATION OF A STANDARDISED LEARNING PROGRAMME:
“After seeing the analytics, 60 doctors from 26 hospitals are now all doing the same course within Bridge. Six months ago those same 60 doctors were learning completely different things. We now control the quality and the information to a really high standard, whereas 6 months back, we had no control over that”.
We’re 20 years old and we’ve experienced growth every year, but that means we've established routines and mindsets that also need to shift as we evolve and continue to grow. Our clients are asking us to take a stronger point of view on things. They are asking us to operate like consultants and challenge their thinking. They're not just asking for us to be responsive to their needs, but be proactive and anticipate their needs.-Phil Burgess, Chief People & Operations Officer
Impact & Feedback:
Tracking Success
As C Space continues their journey in creating a more people-centric learning experience for their employees, Phil and his team anticipate leveraging Bridge in numerous ways:
DEVELOPING TEAMS AND EMPLOYEES
Market leader in people-centric development:
“For us to retain our best talent, and to deliver what our clients expect from us, we need to attract and source the best talent. It’s a competitive talent market right now, so we strive to offer our people amazing learning opportunities. We hope Bridge will help people better access and make the most of them.”
Learning + Opportunity:
“We have a tremendous amount of great training content, but like many businesses, have struggled to organize it and ensure that it’s easily accessible to people. One of the tactical challenges we have to solve for is organizing that content so people know what content exists, and also how different learning opportunities tie to competencies and career paths.”
COACHING MANAGERS TO BE EFFECTIVE
Consistent, candid conversations:
“At C Space, we believe in partnership between managers, their teams, and the HR team, who provide coaching and support. With Bridge, we hope that we will enable our Reporting Managers and their direct reports to have more frequent and meaningful conversations around performance, learning, and how it will impact their careers. We know that technology is only part of the solution. It’s also about complementing our efforts with additional training and support for our Reporting Managers so they are better prepared to have those effective conversations.”
Creating coaching partnerships with HR:
“What used to be a more centrally coordinated process will now become an active, ongoing interaction between managers and their people. Throughout the year, we want to empower managers to have great conversations which will result in less surprises come review time. Bridge will support the employee development journey, so skills and potential can be tied to pathways for growth. I’m hoping it leads to conversations like, ‘These are the skills that you need to develop and here’s a relevant module that you could take next month.’”
DRIVING BUSINESS IMPACTS
Celebrating personal growth and pushing limits:
“For us to retain our best talent, and to deliver what our clients expect from us, we need to attract and source the best talent. It’s a competitive talent market right now, so we strive to offer our people amazing learning opportunities. We hope Bridge will help people better access and make the most of them.”
Learning + Opportunity:
“We are actively trying to celebrate learning more across the business to help highlight one of our core values, Find What Fascinates. We’re trying to make learning less feel like L&D in a classroom and much more like part of the cultural fabric of who we are and how we set ourselves up in the market.”
Industry
Customer Agency: Market Research, Consulting, Advertising
Established
1999
Headquarters
Boston, MA
