Managing culture through change can be challenging for any organization. In this session, you’ll get an inside look at how Culture Amp approached the Zugata acquisition. Walk away with a clear understanding on how to navigate a large scale change process by asking and acting on employee feedback.

1. Culture Amp + Zugata
Culture First Merging & Acquiring
Culture First Conference, July 29 2019

2. Employee feedback is the
compass for your M&A map

3. Who Am I?

4. Where we
were in
January 2019
Culture Amp
• 300+ employees
• “Employee Feedback”
• Not in Palo Alto
Zugata
• 12 employees
• “Performance Management”
• Totally in Palo Alto
(and Argentina)

5. Step 1:
Starting with
our goals, not
with a survey
Key goals for our Zugata acquisition
• People
Integrate in a Culture First way
• Product
Balancing speed with breadth/depth
• Customer
Get to market quickly to give customers the value from
Engagement + Performance

6. Step 2:
Employee
Feedback as
our Compass
Using Employee Feedback to support our integration goals
• Acquisition Survey
• Onboarding Surveys for former Zugis
• Anonymous Acquisition “AMA” Survey

7. Having an
existing strategy
helped us
manage change
Q4
Survey
Q1
Survey
Q2
Survey
Pre-Acquisition Baseline
What changes are we
seeing?
Acquisition Survey
(Q1 Engagement)
Point-in-time measurement
Q2 Engagement Pulse
Tracking progress
Our employee feedback cadence helped us implement our
Acquisition survey in the flow of our feedback strategy

8. Step 3:
Calibrating
towards your
Outcome
Designing Our Survey
Outcome
Acquisition
Confidence
Comms & Action
Owned by central
teams, Growth Teams
Demographics
Factors & Questions

9. Step 4:
Adjusting
our Map
Some things we learned Some things we did
Acquisition Confidence is super
high, Engagement at an all-time
high
Zugi onboarding
missed some context
Questions in our performance
management philosophy
More enablement more quickly
• Continued what we were doing!
• Communicated results (with
care towards Zugi-specific results)
• Worked through mentors
• Get Zugis to SF more
• Culture Add from Zugis
• Science of performance
management sessions
• Content support
• Local Tiger Teams
• Re-prioritized resources
• Slack channel

10. Step 5:
Recalibrating
the journey
Fast Forward a few months…
Acquisition
Survey (Feb)
Q2 Engagement
Pulse (June)
Q1
Survey
New “Perform”
Team takes form
Educating the company
on performance
Launch Performance
to customers
Launch new internal
Performance
Management process
Q2
Survey

11. From
Integration
to BAU
Q1 Acquisition Survey Q2 Engagement Survey
• Acquisition Confidence
• Engagement
• Zugis / Non-Zugis
• Teams / Groups
• Engagement
• Acquisition Confidence
• 1 Acquisition Factor
• Focus on new team structure /
new Camps
• In context of broader results
• 1-off sessions to Project Teams
• Handed off to regular
parts of company
• All questions
Acquisition-related
• Company-wide
• Centralized to
Integration Team
Outcomes
Questions
Demographics
Comms
Action

12. Moving
forward
with BAU
After our survey, we were able to retire our core Integration
team, to be picked up by regular parts of the business
• Acquisition Confidence
Just as high as it was 3 months ago (93%)
• Evolving Enablement (Externally & Internally)
Huge improvement in understanding our approach to
performance
• Pressure on “Perform” Product Team
High stress, but also high support

13. And the
journey
continues…
Fast Forward a few months…
Q2
Survey
???
???
???
???
Q3
Survey

14. 1. Build Your Strategy Now
2. Start with your Outcome
3. Get to BAU

15. Thank you!