Catalant’s Cultural Values
Catalant’s Cultural Values
A Unique Visual Identity for Catalant's Cultural Values
Background
During my time at Catalant, the topic of providing greater visibility for the company’s Cultural Values came up on multiple occasions. We considered graphic shirts, in-office murals, and a regular newsletter. As I stepped in to investigate the origins—I mean, I wasn’t entirely aware of the cultural values—I partnered with several individuals who had been with the company since the early days and were a part of architecting these core values.
First, let’s define what we mean by culture at Catalant.
Culture is a set of operating values that dictate how the company functions and how people within that company behave. It is a set of expectations that the company has for its employees and—simultaneously—a set of principles that employees have for how the company treats and enables them.
The Cultural Values were developed by an internal committee and endorsed by the company’s then joint CEOs. These included just three values: Be Excellent, Be a Force-Multiplier, and Be Audacious.
We had detailed notes on what qualities were representative of each of these values, but nothing existed in terms of visuals or regular communications. When building anything memorable, visuals can play an important role in retention and recall. One study published in Frontiers in Neuroscience found that imagery can be quickly etched into our long term memory—even without explicit instructions to memorize them. In contrast, text or speech alone is soon forgotten, because only about 10-20% of what we read or heard can be recalled after just three days.
To that end, we decided to create a unique visual identity for the values that ties into Catalant’s updated branding, produce highly-visible artwork and graphics around the office to raise awareness, and deploy a system for internal recognition—by mode of anonymous shout outs from colleagues and leadership.
Concept
We kicked off with an exploration into possible visual identifiers for each of the values. Unlike most corporate values, Catalant’s were engaging and each value was presented as an action. That aspect, combined with the exciting nature of our work, compelled us to create dynamic visuals that were engaging and encouraging.
Be Excellent was characterized as having a growth mindset, taking pride in your work, having a detailed plan, and maintaining a high degree of integrity.
We wanted something that could quickly be identified as a product of excellence. We also needed something that would embody a system that encourages feedback that is both positive and specific. The final concept for this value was a diamond.
Though we weren’t aware of it at the time, providing feedback in the form of diamonds—as opposed to hearts—is a method endorsed by LifeLabs Learning and Build the Stage. The rationale for this being that—like diamonds—great feedback is rare and valuable. And further, well-received feedback needs to be detached from personal sentiments and emotional qualities, which tend to make feedback less actionable and often difficult to internalize.
Be a Force-Multiplier was defined as being highly collaborative, gaining the trust of your colleagues, respecting your teammates, and being able to provide real-time feedback with your team.
Within a flat organizational structure, it’s imperative to have leaders who are also great at managing—those who are exceptional at enabling and inspiring phenomenal and collaborative work to happen without micromanaging all the details or demoralizing your staff.
At Catalant, we were hard at work developing a massive talent marketplace that could integrate within an organization’s existing internal and external networks. We would often characterize these networks in visuals of interlocking nodes and this became an inspiration of the force-multiplier. Someone who embodies these qualities would essentially be the central node that interlocks the adjacent nodes. Their actions would both impact and be influenced by those in proximity to them and they would seek opportunities to strengthen connections and create whole new chains in the network.
Be Audacious meant to aim your sights high enough that failure may be inevitable, yet learn from those mistakes, pursue incredible goals, and be able to share that vision and enthusiasm with others.
Inspired by Jim Collins, author of Built to Last, committing to audacious goals is the real path to achieving progress and even great success. Similar to Collins’s reference to the audacious goal of putting a man on the moon, the visual concept we settled on was a rocket, engines blazing and heading onward and upward. In the animated renders, the rocket fluctuates, accelerating and decelerating, rising and failing. This was to simulate that audacious goals aren’t always linear and the probability of success isn’t usually in your favor.
And much like rockets in the 1960s, these goals often have equal chances of taking you to the moon or going up in flames. Yet, a core mission of Catalant was to be the ones enabling critical changes in the workforce and transforming the nature of work itself. To that end, being audacious was absolutely aligned with the company’s objectives and we encouraged that quality in all of our team members.
Execution
For the internal recognition system, we began with drop boxes scattered throughout the office. After some time collecting responses, we would showcase them during All-Firm Meetings. This show and tell style display enabled others to quickly grasp and understand real-world examples of colleagues embodying each of the values.
If someone received a shout-out, they would get a personalized email outlining what they did and why it helped their team. They would later get a graphic sticker of that specific cultural value to slap to their laptop, water bottle, notebook, or anything else. If the submitter chose to, it would display their name so that only the receiver knew who it was coming from. Additionally, we solicited some feedback on the process, which led to other innovative approaches.
As awareness grew, so did the number of responses. And there was a lot of manual effort involved to keep things moving. To speed things up, we created a Google Form that upon submission would update a Google Sheet. This now gave us a visible record of shout outs and who was sending them. From here, we created an integration that would periodically check for changes in the spreadsheet and send out automated, personalized emails to those that received recognition.
We further optimized the system by creating animated Slack emojis of the values and a custom function within Slack to generate shout outs that would integrate into the broader system. This made the process much less hands on, automating most of the tasks—except presentations to the firm and physically handing out stickers. It also played a key role in reminding team members daily about the values and how to submit a shoutout.
The number of submissions continued to climb and we quickly found out that there were so many great things happening behind the scenes. We were able to share these stories with leadership and put together an internal video that talked about the values, detailed what they mean to leadership, and shared a collection of impactful stories.
Outcomes
So, what exactly did this all look like?
Artwork
Animations
Example Shout-Outs
Anytime I need help finding a room, organizing a new hire welcome event, or finding my way around, [my colleague] is there with a smile, willing to lend a hand. Where she finds the time and energy to do all she does is anyone's guess. I hope [my colleague] feels appreciated every day!
Designing and running storytelling workshops for more than half of the company's employees (across functions!) so that we can build a cohesive skill of telling stories that will enable significant commercial impact (better salespeople!) but also create a unified experience across functions, where traditionally L&D has kept Build/GTM as two separate areas.
[My colleague] continually illustrates, "Think as broadly as you can, and share your vision with others." He is on fire with his efforts surrounding Customer Value stories. He embodies "be audacious" as he continues to not only share his vision with others but solicit feedback and brainstorms, too.
Metrics
Lessons Learned
This was one of the most impactful and rewarding branding projects I had worked on. Not only was it great to help gather stories from across the firm and meet new faces, but I had the opportunity to help shape the company culture. The individuals that conceived the Cultural Values had put together a message that was unique and valuable, which I was able to help amplify through the use of design, communications, and intuitive technology.
One of the greatest lessons learned from this was that feedback matters. People are out there crushing their goals every day. Unfortunately, helpful and actionable feedback is exceedingly rare, which leads to individuals getting stuck or feeling isolated. A simple acknowledgement of something excellent or audacious that someone did can go a long way in boosting their self-esteem, their drive, and even their commitment to the firm.
Effective feedback doesn’t always have to come from a direct manager either. It’s up to everyone in a company—whether at the top of leadership or someone entirely new—to call out the many unseen and often phenomenal things their colleagues are doing. At the end of the day, simply expressing gratitude that someone is on the team can be a force-multiplier for productivity in of itself. As we encourage learning and improvement through effective and timely feedback, we can help build authentic relationships that are critically important to high-performing teams.
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