workplace-culture
(25)
HBR IdeaCast: Better questions. Better Mondays.
A free podcast built from Harvard Business Review’s editorial bench turns management ideas into something you can question, test, and take to work.
Didier Elzinga and the art of letting go
He left Hollywood to explore what makes people work well together. Culture Amp’s founder has now handed over the CEO’s chair - and is putting his own ideas about growth to the test.
Bravely: rehearse the conversation that could change your job
The difficult conversation is a workplace skill with remarkably little rehearsal time. Bravely sells employers a place for that rehearsal - and is now bringing an AI coach into the meeting itself.
Terryberry and the business of being remembered
A company that once put appreciation into pocket watches now puts it into software. Its most interesting wager is that a thank-you works better when people can see it, choose it, and sometimes keep it.
Steve Sonnenberg Put a Thank-You Note on the Balance Sheet
He lost his first company, borrowed $5,000 for a domain, and spent four years making an impossible Amazon rewards idea work by hand. The wager turned workplace appreciation into a platform used across 163 countries.
Dale Bornstein Built an Agency by Treating Culture as the Work
After 27 years at one agency, Dale Bornstein took a risk on a smaller one. Her bet was that people-first leadership could be a growth strategy - and M Booth's next decade made the case.
Rachita Sharma Bet Her Name on a Fairer Kind of Work
At thirteen, she dropped a surname to reject an inherited advantage. Years later, Rachita Sharma built a company around the same wager: judge young people by what they can become.
The Company That Thinks Your Engagement Score Is Lying
Integral built an employee-experience agency around a small heresy: a healthy engagement score can hide a workforce that is stuck, skeptical or quietly checking out. Its answer is to measure what people actually do next.
The Message Was Fine. The Meeting Was the Problem.
KWI Communications has built a consultancy around an unfashionable idea: before you polish the message, ask the people doing the work why they are not buying it.
Culture Amp wants your employee survey to have consequences
Thousands of companies use Culture Amp to ask employees what they think. Its next bet is AI that helps managers do something with the answers - while the company faces hard questions about its own workplace.
The 99-Year-Old Award Maker Turning Thank-Yous Into Enterprise Software
O.C. Tanner began with class rings and service pins. Now it sells a sprawling recognition system to global employers - and argues that the object still matters as much as the dashboard.
Mindi Cox Built a Career by Looking Up From the Job
For nearly three decades at O.C. Tanner, she has treated culture less like a slogan and more like a daily operating system - built from open doors, specific gratitude, and the courage to let people do more than their job descriptions.
Becky Jones Has Spent 25 Years Making Advertising Feel Human
An internship pulled her toward cable. A research job got her through the door. At Viamedia, Becky Jones turned the supporting work of marketing into a 25-year study of how people, culture and technology move together.
Arianna Huffington Has Changed the Subject Again
She built a publication around the internet's appetite for more. Her second company is built around a harder proposition: that progress can begin with less, done deliberately.
Brittany Wong Is Marketing the Moment When Work Feels Human
Across two decades and several software categories, Brittany Wong has built a career around a stubborn question: how do you turn an abstract promise into a habit people can actually feel? At Bucketlist Rewards, that question now lands on recognition itself.
Chris Fudge Is Betting the Workplace on One Small Signal: I Saw What You Did
After three decades crossing marketing, sales, service and coaching, the Achievers CMO has arrived at a plainspoken thesis: culture is built in the moments when useful work becomes visible.
Achievers Quit Selling Coffee Mugs - and Built the Recognition Machine HR Teams Can Copy
The Toronto company began with branded swag until one customer punctured the premise: nobody works harder for a coffee mug. Its second act turned appreciation into a daily data stream - and offers HR leaders a useful playbook, with sharp limits.
Bucketlist Turned a Million-User Side Project Into the Employee Recognition Habit HR Can Actually Measure
The consumer app had more than a million users. The better business appeared when employers kept asking for something else: a way to turn everyday appreciation into a system people would actually use.
Workhuman
Workhuman turned two decades of thank-you notes into a data business. The Irish-American company behind the 'thank you economy' now reaches 8 million workers and mines their gratitude for what HR software usually misses.
Emily Mikailli
Emily Mikailli is the CHRO and Chief of Staff to the CEO at Signifyd, the commerce protection platform based in San Jose, California. A former lawyer who traded the bar for the tech industry, she has led People and Culture at Signifyd since 2016, scaling the company's global workforce nearly 5X in headcount and over 25X in annual recurring revenue across offices in San Jose, London, Belfast and New York. Born and raised in Silicon Valley, she is known for a candid, human-centric approach to building teams and serves as Vice Chair of the board at Parisi House on the Hill, a nonprofit supporting mothers and children affected by addiction.
ibelong
ibelong is a San Francisco-based consultancy that helps organizations build inclusive, resonant workplace cultures using a neurochemical framework grounded in affective neuroscience, relational neurobiology and epigenetics. Led by CEO and epigenetic coach Rajkumari Neogy, the company translates the brain science of trust and belonging into practical programs - immersive courses, leadership coaching, compassion circles and layoff (RIF) support - aimed at reducing conflict, burnout and turnover. Formerly known as iRestart, ibelong has worked with leaders at more than 175 startups and enterprises.
Ethena
Ethena is a New York-based compliance and workplace-culture training platform that turns the most-dreaded items on the corporate calendar - harassment prevention, code of conduct, cybersecurity, DEI - into short, well-written, mobile-friendly lessons people actually finish. Founded in 2019 by Roxanne Bras Petraeus and Anne Solmssen, it pairs legally vetted content with microlearning, Slack/email nudges, an ethics hotline, case management and AI-built courses, serving customers like Netflix, Zendesk, Carta and Figma.
Roxanne Petraeus
Roxanne Bras Petraeus is the co-founder and CEO of Ethena, a New York compliance-training startup that turns the most ignored hour at work, the annual harassment course, into something people actually finish. A Rhodes Scholar, Harvard ROTC graduate, and U.S. Army combat veteran who deployed to Afghanistan before consulting at McKinsey, she launched Ethena in 2019 with engineer Anne Solmssen and has raised roughly $50 million, including a $30 million Series B in 2022, to make compliance modern, funny, and forgiving rather than fear-based.
Emtrain
Emtrain is a San Francisco-based workplace CultureTech company that pairs video-based microlearning with a behavioral analytics engine. Founded by employment lawyer Janine Yancey, it sells respect, inclusion, and ethics training to more than 800 organizations - including Netflix, Yelp, Dolby, and Live Nation - while quietly mining every learner click for early signals of cultural risk.
Janine Yancey
Janine Yancey is the Founder and CEO of Emtrain, a San Francisco-based AI-powered compliance training and workplace culture analytics platform she founded in 2006. A former employment lawyer and first-generation college graduate, she built Emtrain to replace lecture-style compliance check-boxes with cinematic, skills-based learning backed by behavioral data. The platform serves 800+ enterprise clients including Netflix, Yelp, and Chevron, has raised $18M in funding, and is known for its proprietary Workplace Color Spectrum and culture benchmarking engine drawing on 25 million employee sentiment data points. Yancey famously predicted the #MeToo movement in a 2016 Medium article - months before it went global.