American Express Global Business Travel: Culture Week
By Maria Perez-Brau, VP Global Talent Development
In 2014, American Express Global Business Travel (GBT) formed a new corporate entity after splitting from its parent company American Express. With this change, the company’s culture needed to evolve to meet the demands of its new business strategy as part of the stand-up of this new organization. GBT’s goal was to build a culture that retained the superior service legacy of American Express while empowering employees to make decisions quickly and encouraging everyone to take ownership of their work.
After defining the company’s new strategy and the culture that would help achieve it, GBT identified gaps between the company’s current and target culture. To assess the current culture and its evolution over time, GBT partnered with CultureIQ to measure 10 qualities common to high-performance cultures. This provided an in-depth view of the organization as a whole and within various employee segments. The annual survey conducted demographic and benchmark comparisons, comment analyses, and regression driver analyses. The results revealed the culture’s strengths, opportunities, and key cultural drivers for engagement.
GBT leveraged the findings to initiate global action planning, refine the company’s mission statement, and establish a few key areas of focus to drive culture change. It revealed that after the first year of the new strategies and values being in place, only 63 percent of employees knew GBT’s culture values and only 45 percent believed in those values. As part of the action plan to address this gap, GBT planned and launched “Culture Week,” a global initiative focused on building employee excitement and purpose around the company’s mission and values.
Culture Week consisted of onsite and virtual activities each day tied to one of GBT’s five culture values – Take Action, Win Together, Own the Outcome, Keep It Simple, and Love What We Do. Remote workers participated in photo contests, crossword puzzles, blogs, and videos. Some remote teams planned meet-ups, volunteer work, and charity runs for team members close enough to join. Each of GBT’s office locations planned their own unique activities such as team building games, recording thoughts on the values on posters around the office, networking breakfasts, decorating cubicles, and sharing their reactions on GBT’s intranet, prompting a 60 percent increase in daily page views.
Culture Week proved to be a major success in educating and exciting employees around GBT’s new culture. Following Culture Week, the next survey revealed that 88 percent of employees knew the values and 81 percent believed in them. While significant progress has been made with mission and value alignment, GBT continues to assess progress by regularly collecting employee feedback and utilizing the information to shape and grow the culture.