#PaycorBelieves Wins Gold Brandon Hall in Cultural Transformation

We are excited to share that the #PaycorBelieves project was awarded a 2020 Gold Brandon Hall Award for Best Advance in Corporate Culture Transformation! This recognition is a testament to the Paycor Learning & Performance team’s ability to activate their organizational values through their people. The Best Advance in Corporate Culture Transformation category awards a workplace strategy that improves the corporate culture, which includes greater career opportunities, increased team collaboration, and employee satisfaction, engagement, and retention. #PaycorBelieves certainly delivered. Here’s the setting: Focused on scalability, Paycor remained a fast-growth company while coming up on 30 years of innovative business when they welcomed Raul Villar, Jr. as Chief Executive Officer in July 2019. To strengthen the company’s commitment to helping business leaders modernize every aspect of people management—from the way they recruit, onboard and develop people, to how they pay and retain them and build a company culture—they added additional C-Suite roles. Even through intense transition, Paycor’s commitment to its people and culture remained strong. With strategic input from C-suite leaders and company-wide feedback, they ultimately articulated and designed 6 Guiding Principles to enforce that commitment. Paycor’s growth strategy depends on recruiting, retaining, and developing the best people. So, when it came to bringing their commitment to life, they recognized that the best way was to show it! Paycor leaders Rachel Maley, Senior Communication and Employee Experience Strategist, and Emily Regenold, Senior Communications Strategist, shared their vision for the program. “We didn’t just want to announce new Guiding Principles,” they said. “We wanted to make them resonate with our Associates. The success of the effort depended on our Associates understanding, embracing, and living the principles that we felt would enable the actions and decisions that would perpetuate growth and innovation. Since everyone learns a different way, it was important to us to approach this project from many different angles.” Their focus shows in their people-first approach. #PaycorBelieves was a seven-week campaign designed to debut Paycor’s 6 Guiding Principles. Through digital media, interactive displays, custom T-shirts, and branded campaign materials, the campaign’s goal was to energize associates and create an environment to learn about and internalize the new Guiding Principles. Across physical and remote locations, associates were encouraged to engage their heads, hearts, and hands in the meaning behind each of Paycor’s Guiding Principles, which were:

1. Take Care of Customers First
2. Take Care of Each Other
3. Do the Right Thing
4. Think Big, Dream Big
5. Compete to Win
6. Have Fun Along the Way

At the heart of the solution was a desire to transform culture in a way that honored Paycor’s past and created momentum for its future.

What We Love About #PaycorBelieves

It engaged employees in innovation. Paycor included highly creative, relevant, and unique experiences and rewards for their associates to drive the highest levels of employee engagement and ownership in the cultural dialogue. In addition to a microsite, email communications, videos, and more, the social challenges and interactive environmental graphics allowed everyone to bring the ideas to life. It encouraged recognition of others. Associates were given the opportunity to nominate their peers for living out the Guiding Principles. This allowed them to build community and connect their actions and their peers to the new Guiding Principles. It facilitates relationships. Many new members of the team are located remotely and often work from home. The onboarding experience ensures that every new hire, no matter their location, is connected to the team and given day-to-day visibility into the culture and colleagues who are modeling best practices that are integral to success. It brought fun to the workplace! The campaign included many fun, interactive elements. Whether it was customizable t-shirts, interactive white board and post-it installations, or holiday traditions, associate experience was factored into the work. It delivered results! Based on a number of metrics, the solution was designed to gather clear evidence of employee engagement with many facets of the campaign. It’s effective in activating strategy. Within the first six months of launching the program, Paycor saw a triple increase in new hires meeting their sales quota by the time they finished onboarding. They also found that individuals who scored top marks in the program activities are now leading the pack in meeting sales quotas, supporting Paycor’s growth. At TiER1 Performance, we love this collaboration with Paycor because of the way that it authentically scaled their cultural values. The #PaycorBelieves campaign allowed associates to experience culture transformation in a way that was fun, memorable, and impactful. To learn more about Paycor, visit paycor.com. Curious about how culture transformation might help bring your strategies to life? Reach out to our team at hello@web-archive-2025.tier1performance.com to connect with a TiER1 team member and learn more!