Ep. 156: Vern Davenport, Partner at QHP & Allison Crumpler, Former VP of People & Culture for Catalyst Clinical Research

Operationalizing values means defining the behaviors behind them, teaching them, and reinforcing them in practice. Allison calls it the “Mr. Miyagi” approach: repeat those behaviors over and over, even when they feel obvious. That repetition is what embeds them into the organization and gives managers and employees a shared language for accountability.

Allison shares a few of the metrics Catalyst used to measure culture beyond traditional engagement and turnover data. They called them “Key Culture Indicators”: employee referrals, town hall attendance and time to hire. Put a target against each indicator, review it alongside operating KPIs, and set a more ambitious target once the current one is consistently achieved.

An individual contributor in a 1,000-person company can’t see how they move EBITDA, so they disengage. Catalyst shared key company metrics across the organization, then helped teams understand how their own work affected sales, customer satisfaction and financial performance. Transparency turned “just doing my job” into “we win or lose together.”