Client Success Stories & Insight
“Advancing humanity through co-creating conscious work cultures” is our purpose. Hear what our former and current clients have to say about how this purpose was realized in their workplaces.
Tourism Toronto is the sales and marketing agency that helps attract millions of visitors to Toronto every year. Their purpose is to lead the world to Toronto – Canada’s downtown – growing the visitor economy. New CEO, Johanne Belanger, needed a longer-term strategy and a way to engage, align and excite the organization.
“The team at 1-degree engaged our Board, industry partners and most importantly our staff at Tourism Toronto. They quickly understood our priority needs and helped us transform our desired future state into a reality within a very quick time frame. Thank you for the assistance 1-DEGREE/Shift!”
– JOHANNE BELANGER, CEO TOURISM TORONTO
Chairman/CEO Jim Lawson and the executive team needed to cast a re-energized and simple 3-year organizational strategy. One that would engage and align the entire organization. After some dialogue, they also had a strong appetite to transform their culture to support their strategy.
“In order to be successful in executing our strategic plan, our #1 priority was to get the culture right. We’ve had a major transformation in the past year (and a half) with the assistance and leadership of 1-degree to engage our entire workforce and look at things differently. The work & foundation that 1-degree helped put in place was exceptional – we’ve had exceptional results and a great turnaround!”
– JIM LAWSON, CEO WOODBINE ENTERTAINMENT
Keilhauer is a global leader in the design, manufacturing and distribution of comfortable and functional office furniture. When CEO Mike Keilhauer, felt that his team had “lost their mojo,” they turned to 1-DEGREE/Shift for support and guidance. Keilhauer started their focus on their extended leadership team – first assessing, then aligning on a leadership culture code and then providing targeted leadership development. Since meaningful and sustainable culture change needs to be modelled from the top, this is often a wise approach.
Here is CEO Mike Keilhauer at a 1-DEGREE/Shift executive breakfast sharing his culture journey going from a 38% entropy (level of friction in the organization) to an organization with a 12% entropy level. He shares his culture story about how a “yes we can” mindset and focused leadership values can fuel business results.
“It’s been an interesting year for me, but now my job is a lot easier today.”
– MIKE KEILHAUER, CEO, KEILHAUER
For most global & matrixed organizations, carving out a unique country culture code that is consistent with the global organization is a real challenge. Crawford Canada chose to engage their entire 1,500+ team in Canada in an inclusive process to assess their culture, engage hundreds of people in Culture focus groups and to align the organization around a powerful culture code to support their people and business.
“We love working with the team at 1-DEGREE/Shift because of their passion for cultural transformation and the insights they brought us based on working with similar organizations. 1-DEGREE/Shift really helped us increase employee engagement throughout our business in Canada.”
– GREG SMITH, CHIEF CLIENT OFFICER, CRAWFORD
FreshBooks is an innovative and successful Canadian software firm. They are the best cloud based small business accounting software on the market. From their beginning, they have had a distinct and energizing culture. Their challenge: how to design and roll out a culturally specific leadership development program for their executives and high potentials that could support their business and unique culture.
“We have loved working with the 1-DEGREE/Shift team. We had a real challenge with a lot of new & young leaders and how we could best invest in these leaders to keep up with the growth of the organization. 1-DEGREE/Shift guided us in an inclusive process, helped us define our unique brand of leadership and brought a real breadth of tools to bespoke our experience and impact with our leaders.”
– MARK GIRVAN, CHIEF COMMERCIAL OFFICER, FRESHBOOKS CANADA
“At Equifax Canada, we began the culture work under the umbrella of our Customer Experience initiative. 1-degree has worked with us to fully understand our business objectives and as a result developed an approach to engage the hearts and minds of our organization on cultural change with a clear focus on “why now” for Equifax.
We have been able to surface what has been getting in the way of creating an internal culture that is aligned to our customer experience objectives. We have framed the discussion around the specific behaviours required to create and reinforce this desired culture – the outcome of the work is our Cultural Attributes, our internal blueprint for holding ourselves and others accountable.”
SAYLOR MILLITZ-LEE, VP HUMAN RESOURCES, EQUIFAX CANADA
