Globo

Transforming the culture of Latin America’s largest media conglomerate, one experiment at a time.

Digital platform development
Large scale co-creation workshops
Extensive primary research / insights gathering

  • Globo, Latin America’s largest media conglomerate, was facing a challenging time with declining viewership due to rapidly increasing competition from new streaming platforms. The undisputed #1 for over 50 years wanted to take action to future-proof offerings and retain its power by becoming a leading D2C company.

    A company-wide reorganization effort to unify its 5+ divisions under the same umbrella (TV, cable and streaming included) set out to simplify operations and find economies of scale. As part of this massive undertaking, we partnered with the CEO and top leaders to drive a new company culture that would enable Globo’s transformation, retaining what was best and working hard to eliminate the bad (and the ugly).

  • I was brought in by London-based ?What If! Innovation Partners (part of Accenture) as one of two leads to help co-create a new leadership vision and “experimentation” program to roll-out culture change efforts among thousands of employees. The project lasted about a year and consisted of two phases (co-creation and implementation).

    Being the only Portuguese speaking consultant, I worked closely with our key Brazilian clients and led cross-department individual interviews and group sessions with 100+ employees. I also designed and moderated an AI-based online live chat with ~300 employees.

    Based on everything we learned, our team developed a comprehensive current-state diagnosis view (“Culture Mirrors”)—translating findings into rich storyboards that immersed senior and mid-level leaders in employees' pain-points and needs. This was presented to senior leaders in a workshop with 150 participants that included creative exercises to come up with actionable solutions.

    We later co-created a future leadership manifesto and culture guiding principles with senior leaders, developing a robust online training course to train hundreds of mid-level leaders on how to implement culture experiments (small-scale work tactics/approaches) that encouraged new, positive work and leadership behaviors. In a train-the-trainer program, I facilitated online sessions where to-be ‘mentors’ aligned on goals, understood the process, picked an experiment to practice with their teams and shared learnings.

    Throughout the project, I helped conceptualize and write all contents of the program in both English and Portuguese.

  • The online culture experimentation platform has been fully rolled out, after a soft launch, among thousands of Globo employees since January 2021, proving a successful tool to improve team relations especially during difficult times brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. The experimentation tool—always imagined as a living and breathing resource—has been improved overtime based on feedback from leaders and enriched with new experiments created by various teams.

The images below illustrate some of the project deliverables. Certain details have been disguised to protect client confidentiality.

Culture assessment phase

01

The first phase of our project consisted of extensive qualitative research with ~600 employees, including one-to-one interviews, focus groups and online sessions, to build a clear perspective of the company culture and map it out across various divisions (considering their respective sub-cultures).

From this work we built 8 “Culture Mirrors”, highlighting a mix of key positive and negative culture elements common across the organization. Each “mirror” included a punchy headline, detailed description and real quotes from employees that brought to life how each theme permeated the culture and the impact they were causing. They were truthful and transparent to purposefully cause a stir and instill a sense of urgency.

We immersed Globo leaders from various divisions in the Culture Mirrors and learnings from the insights phase during a large-scale (and, dare we say, cathartic) workshop with 150 participants. We facilitated creative exercises to instill empathy, build alignment and come up with actionable solutions when it comes to behaviors leaders would need to embody to drive change.

Prior to this workshop, we conducted smaller sessions with the top leadership to build and refine the “mirrors”.

New leadership manifesto

02

We collaborated with a group of 20 senior leaders, including the top leadership, to craft a new leadership manifesto that would enable Globo’s desired culture transformation based on key behaviors leaders agreed it needed to change/be incorporated. We ran a “Try It Out” phase with this set of leaders to pilot the experimentation program, using their experiences and testimonials to encourage other leaders to join in.

We arrived at 9 manifesto behaviors and later engaged a larger group of leaders (~150) to immerse them in the manifesto, refine them and co-create tactics to bring each to life among employees.

Culture Experimentation platform

03

We developed a robust online program where thousand of employees can get trained and access a wide range of recommended culture “experiments”—organized by each leadership manifesto behavior—to use with their teams.

The course walks Globo employees through the journey of culture change step by step, explaining in great detail the purpose of the program, how to prioritize experiments depending on the culture element/theme they want to improve, which tactic to pick and how to implement it (and stay on track when all fails).

The online program opens to all, with honesty and transparency, what came up in the diagnostic phase to show commitment to culture change from the leadership and emphasize how important the role of each employee is in driving change.

Each step includes testimonial videos from Globo leaders on the experiments they did themselves during the pilot phase and a library of “experiments” was available for employees to pick from.