You're likely in one of two places with your current culture.
Your culture is “good” or “fine” and you’re a visionary who sees the potential of your people to truly thrive - knowing this will not only support the team but also the success of your entire organization. You’re looking for experts who know the tangible nuanced shifts of what it takes to go from good enough to exceptional.
Or your culture has some major challenges and you want to do the right thing, but you don’t know where to start. You’re looking for a lifeline from real people who can support you in making a real sustainable difference, quickly.
You may also be looking for a development workshop or retreat to strengthen your team. Or a simple powerful framework to address a specific culture challenge. We’re here for that too.
As company culture consultants, we’ve helped organizations from software, engineering, government, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, construction, education, senior living, law firms - and the list goes on - build empowering workplace cultures that foster pride and productivity.
Here’s what we know: regardless of industry or where your culture is today, people are people. While people are dynamic and complex, what’s foundationally important to them in their work experience is similar. This is what we know — we know what really matters to people, we know what will truly make the difference for a team to thrive.
This is why we’ve been able to take aspirational organizations from being in the top 20% for workplace culture to the top 5%. This is also why we were able to take a government team (whose industry standard is less than 1% voluntary turnover) that had 22% voluntary turnover to 0% voluntary turnover in just one year.
In addition to all of our years of real-world experience, we are uniquely founded on over 1000 hours of research done in collaboration with the Industrial-Organizational Psychology Department at Colorado State University. A department that conducts cutting-edge research to solve global behavioral and brain health challenges.
Where many saw just another moving company Kris recognized quickly that if her employees felt good about coming to work, they would take better care of customers. In turn, this meant the financial health of the company would prosper.
The catch was the deck was stacked against her. In 2003, the company was struggling to cover payroll. Turnover was high and culture toxicity even higher.
So she went to work to find another way, a way that put the focus on the only real leverage she had – her team.
She discovered that when people feel good about coming to work, they show up not only as better workers but as better people for everyone in their lives. Step-by-step she cultivated ways to create a culture where her team did feel good about coming to work.
Under her leadership Exodus became the largest mover in Northern Colorado with a turnover rate of 40% less than the industry average and a bottom line twice that same average.
But most notable of all – the workplace experience of her team went from being one of misery to one of joy.
From there, the vision of Choose People came into existence – and Kris’ life’s work truly began.
Kris is the author of Culture Works: How to Create Happiness in the Workplace. She has also been featured as a workplace culture expert in Inc., Entrepreneur and Forbes and was named one of the “Top 100 Leadership Speakers” in Inc.
It may not have been a compliment, but she’s taking it as one, since she has been thinking about and working with workplace culture for nearly two decades.
Since her early career at the CIA and in the Intelligence Community, she has had the opportunity to work in many different situations—as a consultant and as a full-time employee, in the public and private sectors, in emerging start-ups and in established international firms, with teams ranging from 5 to 500,000, everywhere from New York City to Irish cow fields.
Before joining Choose People full time as a company culture consultant, she was a VP of People + Culture and built teams both in the U.S. and abroad, where she has won a number of awards, including Great Place to Work certifications for hundreds of people and the Dublin Women in Tech Leader award.
She’s a people person, and she’s also data-driven. As a result, she holds a number of degrees, including a Master of Science in HR Analytics and Measurement analytics, and a swath of certifications, including HR’s highest as a SHRM-SCP and the Science of Happiness at Work certification from UC Berkeley.
Her work has taught her that every company is different–and that traditional HR solutions won't always solve the problem (and that buying ping-pong tables never will). With Kris at Choose People, she leverages innovations and insights from the latest research in neuroscience, organizational psychology, and the new world of work. The focus is not just information but transformation.