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Brains Improves Company Culture Using Insights from Great Place To Work’s Trust Index Survey

Creative agency Brains has earned Great Place To Work Certification for seven consecutive years, with 92% of employees endorsing its culture. Spread across six states, it uses the Trust Index Survey to enhance recognition and community ties, ensuring a unified employee experience.

Brains Improves Company Culture Using Insights from Great Place To Work’s Trust Index Survey

Meet Brains On Fire, Inc.

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Hi, I’m Brandy Amidon. I’m the co-president and CFO of Brains, and I look after the people and money side of the business. I’ve been with Brains for 18 years. I started as a staff accountant and moved my way up to CFO; I became an owner about seven years ago. 

Key Outcomes 

8-point increase in employee purpose

Survey insights led to Brains incorporating “giving back” into policies, which led to increases in feelings of purpose.

13-point increase in company pride

Survey insights helped Brains focus on pride-building initiatives, leading to a big swell in this metric.

Unbiased analysis

The third-party nature of the survey meant that Brains had an impartial assessment from a third-party, rather than data and analysis skewed by in-house assumptions.

Personalized recognition

Brains polled its employees on how they like to be recognized and tailored its accolades to suit the different preferences.

Strategic insights

The survey results included high-scoring sentiments along with the low scores, so Brains could recognize where it was succeeding in addition to identifying pain points.

Why we partnered with Great Place To Work 

Since becoming a B Corporation in 2017, we’ve committed to sustainability and employee well-being. This partnership helps us demonstrate our dedication to both environmental care and the exceptional care of our team. 

One of the B Corp requirements is to survey your employee base, and that’s when we started looking for a survey with company culture and workplace benchmarks. We had heard of Great Place To Work and knew it had a lot of legitimacy. It was an easy sell for us. 

We appreciate that it shows us your culture’s challenges, opportunities, and strengths. It wasn’t just a point of view from within the company — when you try to survey your own team, you lean into your own personal bias. 

“We always had a hunch we were on to something special, but it wasn’t until our partnership with Great Place To Work that we had the data to back it up. It was a game changer for our culture and our work.”

Moe Rice, Director of People and Culture

Challenge
Maintaining purpose and a positive company culture  

We’re proud of providing a physically safe workplace where everyone is treated fairly, but our 2023 Trust Index™ Survey highlighted areas needing attention: 

  • Only 72% felt good about our contributions to the community — one of our lowest scores.
  • 81% felt there were opportunities for special recognition — good, but still an area for growth.  

Identifying the Issues

We are currently refining what 'community' and 'recognition' mean across our diverse locations, as we operate in six states. Using our 2024 Trust Index data in real time, we are addressing these questions to create actionable plans for 2025. We are also exploring how our employees prefer to receive recognition — whether it's public praise, private acknowledgment, or something else. 

Solution
Trust Index Survey insights  

Using insights from the survey, we defined "community" more broadly and explored different ways employees liked to give back — whether hands-on, through pro-bono work, or donations:

  • We transitioned from giving individual birthday gifts to increasing our overall donations to not-for-profits as a company. We realized that employees valued contributing to charitable causes more than receiving a small personal gift, and they were less concerned with which specific organization benefited, as long as our donations were going to support those making a positive impact.
  • We diversified our recognition approaches to include leader shout-outs during team meetings, private acknowledgments, and public recognition. 

Outcome
Up to 13-point increase in key culture indicators 

These changes helped us align more closely with our team’s preferences for community involvement and recognition. The survey guided us in focusing our efforts more effectively, ensuring our actions resonated well with our diverse team, and reinforcing our commitment to creating a workplace that’s more than just a job — it’s a place where employees feel a special sense of meaning and purpose. 

Our recognition and purpose scores each increased 8 points from 2023 to 2024.  

But the largest improvement was how many employees said they feel proud to work for our company. That went up 13 points. 

[A strong sense of purpose and company pride are both connected to employee retention, according to Great Place To Work research.] 

Having the survey data gave us clear places to direct our energies and budgets. Recognition and pride were a huge push for us. 

I think a benefit of partnering with Great Place To Work is the consistency — we get the data but employees also see us not only invest in the Trust Index survey, but follow through on it. It builds trust within the team, which adds to the culture and all the things that everybody says that they want from an employer. 

The Trust Index is a stable, reputable measurement for us, through all the swings of a business. 

The Great Place To Work experience 

Great Place To Work already had an excellent reputation in the company culture space, so I didn’t have to worry whether it was just trendy or if it would be there in three years. I already knew that having Great Place To Work Certification was a big deal. And then there was the ease of working with Great Place To Work staff and the survey—it was so easy. 

“What we value in our partnership with Great Place To Work is the ability to access insightful data that directly informs our internal improvement strategies”

Moe Rice, Director of People and Culture

I remember someone walking me through the report the first time. It was nice to have that handholding at the very beginning—that separates Great Place To Work from the others. 

I’ve used very cumbersome tools over the years, but the dashboard Great Place To Work provides is easy and intuitive, making my job easier. 

I love being able to analyze the positive with the negative 

It's like an employee's annual performance review: identifying strengths and areas for improvement. For a company, doing an annual pulse check on culture and employee experience is essential. While we're always working on the business, this provides a focused, structured opportunity to assess our progress and make meaningful adjustments

Everybody contributes their input and feels part of the process of asking, “What are our top statements, and what are our bottom statements?” 

We’re working to celebrate more because we immediately look at what we need to work on. For example, in an annual review, you might say, “OK, well, so-and-so said that I need to work on XYZ, and you forget the 30 other amazing things that people said about you.”  

My advice about turning data into action 

We are a living testament to the transformative power of data-driven action plans. Our journey shows that positive change is not just possible but inevitable with effort and commitment. 

What we value in our partnership with Great Place To Work is the ability to access insightful data that directly informs our internal improvement strategies. We want to do better, but how do you get there? First, you need to know your data, and then you can turn it into actionable information. 

We always had a hunch we were on to something special, but it wasn’t until our partnership with Great Place To Work that we had the data to back it up. We used the results as an opportunity to dig deeper. What was resonating, and what was falling flat? We used that information to update our core values. Once those values are aligned, we could set a clear yearly vision.  

Survey insights were a game changer for our culture and our work, and the Great Place To Work Trust Index Survey was absolutely the catalyst to getting us there. 

Products and features used

Trust Index™ Survey

Our rigorously developed employee survey is the global standard for quantifying the ROI of workplace culture, leadership impact, and measuring the employee experience.

Learn More

Great Place To Work® Certification™

Certification gives employers a recruiting advantage by providing a globally recognized and research-backed verification of great employee experience.

Learn More

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