About the Client
The client is a major brand operating at the intersection of health and fitness, ranking among the top 10 companies in its industry in Russia.
The Challenge
Explore employees' attitudes and perspectives to help define the company's mission and core values ahead of major organizational changes.
Needed a Shared Mission Ahead of Major Changes
The company was preparing for major changes that would require everyone on the team to get involved. The new HR Director wanted to define a mission and a set of core values that would help employees move in the same direction. But these values had to reflect how people actually felt about their work and the company.
To make sure the values on paper matched reality, we needed to do some research. We wanted to find out what employees valued about the company, what they were proud of, what frustrated them, and why they worked there in the first place. We also needed to understand which values were already reflected in everyday decisions and which existed only in words. And, importantly, whether management's view of the company matched how the rest of the team actually felt.
We decided to start with the board of directors, since they would be responsible for putting the changes into practice. I needed to develop a set of questions and conduct in-depth interviews to understand where the directors agreed, where their opinions differed, and how they reached decisions together. Next, I would prepare questionnaires for employees at different levels of the company to see whether the same themes and problems appeared in their answers.
After that, my job was to analyze all the findings and identify the values the company could build on when defining its mission and working with the team. I also needed to highlight potential obstacles to change: where employees felt there wasn't enough transparency, which workplace relationships caused frustration, and what prevented people from working well together.
Created Three Sets of Questions
I prepared three questionnaires: one for in-depth interviews with the directors, another for surveying regional managers, and a third for a company-wide employee survey. The directors' questionnaire was the most detailed. I focused on questions about real experiences: when was the last time they felt proud of their team, what had disappointed them, and how their colleagues had handled specific situations. If you ask people directly about company values, it's easy to get answers like "We're kind, we're great, and we care about people." I wanted actual stories that would help me understand what was behind those words.
I also added some questions based on associations: if the company were an animal, what would it be? What kind of journey would represent it? What music would its customers listen to? These questions helped people open up and gave me a better understanding of how they saw the brand. The key was always asking why they'd chosen that particular image. Sometimes, an unexpected association revealed deep frustration with a fairly ordinary workplace problem. Other times, it uncovered meaningful reasons why people genuinely loved the company. Some interviewees found these questions a bit strange, but their explanations often provided some of the most valuable insights.
For regional managers, I shortened the questionnaire and reduced the number of questions that required lengthy written answers. During an interview, you can ask follow-up questions and request examples. But with a written survey, you can't expect the same level of engagement. I designed the third questionnaire for any employees who wanted to participate. The goal was to check whether the themes that emerged during the interviews also appeared across the wider team. I also thought ahead about how I'd analyze the results. After all, I'd have to read and compare several hundred detailed responses.
12 | 19 | 280 |
|---|---|---|
In-depth interviews with directors | Survey responses from managers participating in the strategy session | Survey responses from company employees |
Interviewed the Directors
The directors would be responsible for putting the changes into practice, so it was important to understand whether they were all on the same page. During the interviews, I asked them to share specific experiences: what made them proud, what they felt ashamed of, how they made decisions, and what happened when they disagreed with colleagues. If someone said that everyone in the company helped each other, I wanted to know what that looked like in practice — and what happened when different departments had conflicting interests.
Not everyone enjoyed these conversations. The association-based questions were particularly unusual for some directors. They didn't understand why I was asking about animals and journeys. One person even told me outright that the questions were strange, and I could tell they were getting annoyed. I had to stay calm, keep the conversation going, and ask them to explain their answers. And that's often where the most interesting insights emerged. Someone might give a very brief answer to a direct question, but when asked about associations, they'd suddenly share ten times more detail.
Some interviewees started opening up about very sensitive issues. After the interviews, they asked me not to share the recordings with the client because we'd discussed confidential internal matters. I removed all names and identifying details from the research materials, including anything that could reveal someone's role in the company. I also deleted the recordings of these particularly sensitive interviews. Then I explained to the HR Director why I couldn't share those recordings. We managed to reach an agreement, and I kept my promise to protect the interviewees' confidentiality.
As the interviews progressed, I noticed how differently the directors viewed their work. Some described it in terms of responsibilities, job titles, and money. Others focused on helping people and the positive impact the company had. Even the harshest criticism often came from a place of genuine concern. People complained because they actually cared about what was happening. These conversations helped me develop my first hypotheses about the company's shared values and internal conflicts. The next step was to compare them with what the rest of the employees had to say.
10.2 | 141 |
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hours of interviews with directors | pages of interview transcripts |
Analyzed 299 Employee Survey Responses
After the interviews, I went through 299 employee survey responses. I read every answer myself because I wanted to understand what people really meant, which themes kept coming up, and where their opinions differed. The open-ended questions were the trickiest part. Employees often expressed the same idea in different words, so I had to group their answers into common themes.
AI helped me with the grouping and calculations. I would come up with a hypothesis and ask it to count how many responses matched each theme. Then I compared the results with what I'd heard from the directors: did they see the company the same way? What did employees value in their colleagues, and what problems did they notice?
The surveys didn't reveal anything fundamentally new, but they helped me validate the findings from the interviews. Many themes appeared at different levels of the company: growth, mutual support, a fast-paced work environment, and a lack of transparency. I also paid special attention to negative responses. Behind the generally positive feedback were employees who felt overlooked and didn't trust the company.
Defined the Company's Values and Uncovered Some Unexpected Insights
Based on the research, I identified five core values that came up repeatedly in both the directors' interviews and employee surveys. For each one, I explained how it showed up in everyday work, why it mattered to employees, and where the company's actions didn't quite match those values. This gave us a foundation for the company's mission and core values that we could discuss with the team.
What surprised me most was that people in very different roles shared the same bigger purpose. It's easy to dismiss things like that as corporate slogans, but here, employees were genuinely talking about the positive impact they wanted to make through their work. At the same time, some directors had a much more practical view of their jobs, focusing on responsibilities, income, and career growth. That was important to consider, too. If we made the mission sound too grand or idealistic, it might not resonate with them at all.
Beyond the core values, I also uncovered several less obvious issues the company needed to address.
The team was close-knit, but mostly within individual departments. Employees often talked about helping each other and having great relationships with their colleagues. But when they described making decisions together, stories of competing interests, misunderstandings, and resentment started to emerge. The responses suggested that strong relationships within departments didn't always translate into good collaboration between them. I pointed out that, alongside the new values, the company needed clear ways to discuss and resolve disagreements.
The fast pace was both inspiring and a source of problems. Directors were proud of the company's rapid growth and the team's ability to handle difficult challenges. But in the same interviews, they complained about chaos, lengthy approval processes, and decisions that suddenly changed. The employee surveys revealed an interesting pattern: people working closer to management actually gave lower ratings to how convenient and transparent the company's processes were.
Behind the generally positive feedback, there was serious frustration among some employees. I identified a fairly large group of employees in one specific role who were particularly unhappy. I highlighted this as an issue the company needed to investigate, understand their concerns, and improve communication and feedback.
The company's belief in its uniqueness didn't always translate into clear customer benefits. The directors saw their business as something special, but struggled to explain why a customer would choose it over similar alternatives. This was more of a marketing insight — a reason to take a closer look at the company's positioning. I also made it clear that my research explored how employees perceived customers, not what customers themselves actually thought.
I put all the findings into a report with quotes, statistics, and conclusions, then presented it to the client. The client said they'd received far more than they expected. That was great to hear. Beyond providing a foundation for the company's mission and values, the research had also uncovered specific challenges for HR and management to address. The team started acting on the findings and later reached out to me again to explore some of the results in more detail.
