Defining a distinct and purpose-built culture aligned with the business’ tech-focused mission
Development of a clear roadmap for embedding values and behaviours into everyday practices across the employee journey
Establishing a cultural foundation that will support innovation, retention, and long-term business success and growth
The challenge
The organisation underwent a strategic restructuring, separating its operations into two distinct business lines:
The established asset-management division, and
A newly formed technology start-up
As part of the transition, the organisation sought to intentionally design and embed a new tech-specific culture for the start-up; one that aligned with the organisation’s evolving strategic ambitions while differentiating itself clearly from its asset-management heritage. While most of the employees had been with the organisation for over a year and were accustomed to the legacy culture, leadership recognised the need to build a culture from first principles: a “blank slate” approach that defined the ideal environment for a high-growth technology business.
The solution
We delivered the work in three phases:
Defining the Target Culture
We developed a first draft of the start-up’s cultural model by:
Conducting background research and analysing competitor cultures
Interviewing the founders and leaders about the strategic objectives and cultural needs for the future. We explored what they thought it was important to keep, tweak, and remove from the current culture, and crucially, what they needed to add
Hosting an offsite workshop to involve the wider team and ensure culture co‑creation and ownership
From these inputs, we produced an initial set of proposed values to shape the culture, and the key behaviours associated which each of these.
Validating & Assessing the Target Culture
We designed a tailored culture assessment with four components:
Values resonance: how strongly employees feel the proposed values show up today
Linking values to business outcomes: which values employees believe will drive business success
Assessment of behaviours: which behaviours are most visible and most aligned to key values
Engagement and retention: how values and behaviours influence people’s engagement and intent to stay with the firm in the longer-term
Applying our culture gap and culture activation analysis to the results of this assessment helped us to produce a final set of data-driven core values and behaviours, defining the target culture.
Embedding the Target Culture
We created a Culture Playbook outlining how the values and behaviours integrate across the employee lifecycle – from hiring and onboarding to performance, leadership, and recognition.
The Playbook served as both an internal and external tool to clarify identity, set expectations, strengthen belonging, enhance the employee value proposition, and align culture with strategic goals.
The impact
Through this structured, participatory, and analytical approach, the business:
Defined a distinct and purpose-built culture aligned with its tech-focused mission
Engaged employees in shaping their own cultural environment
Gained a clear roadmap for embedding values and behaviours into everyday practices across the employee journey
Established a cultural foundation that will support innovation, retention, and long-term business success and growth
The resulting culture was not an evolution of the past; it was an intentional and deliberately crafted framework built from first principles to position the organisation for the future.
Our client is a leading crypto asset management company, and parent firm of one of largest issuers of cryptocurrency exchange-traded products (ETPs) in the world. The company specialises in bridging traditional finance with digital assets through secure ETPs and wrapped tokens. They are a global company headquartered in Zurich with offices in New York and London. We worked primarily with the Chief of Staff and Senior Vice President of People to deliver this project.
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