Background

TIAA is a full service financial services firm of over 10,000 employees. The company is dedicated and specializes in the financial management and needs needs of those in the academic, medical, cultural, governmental and research fields. TIAA is known as experts in managing investment assets and innovators in delivering personalized financial advice for the long term. Since the company’s founding in 1918, TIAA believes that truly living the TIAA values is a source of competitive advantage and fulfills the promise to their investors.

Our Process & Methodology

Camden Delta was tasked with creating/validating the values and embedding them within the culture of the organization. After creating a detailed “activate the values” roadmap in collaboration with a steering team at TIAA, the refined values were tested with employee groups and in forums all around the company in major operations including New York, Charlotte and Denver. The forums included town hall meetings, smaller departmental meetings and employee groups, as well as established Diversity & Inclusion affiliation groups that eventually became a key stakeholder in the vetting process.

The intent of the “activate the values” phase of work were to capture the essential actions and behaviors in stories, signs, symbols and heroes that already exemplified the refined values and would illustrate the values in “real life”. This initial step proved to be a critical and highly valuable process for TIAA in that it provided immediate “walk the walk” evidence that the culture and values aspired to as part of the Culture Refresh were already in practice and provided invaluable content to include in key processes that were already being redesigned to meet the strategic objectives of the firm and would embody the values.
Working in collaboration with the heads of Talent Acquisition, Diversity & Inclusion and Total Rewards, along with representation from HR Business Partners and Business Leaders, Camden Delta organized and facilitated multiple workshops and process review sessions to uncover opportunities to enhance the firms position in promoting and integrating the cultural values into these processes. With content from the town halls and other events, each program was able to pull from common stories and themes to create a very holistic and integrated approach to promoting the values while introducing key changes to programs.

Additional work included supporting executive business leaders in integrating the values into exisitng business routines such as staff meetings and other forums where leadership leveraged the opportunity for personal reflection and to recognize staff members and teams who were “living the values” everyday. They also benefitted from a number of benchmarking site visits to leading class “culture leaders” such as Zappos to better understand what leadership at those organizations were doing to create a vibrant culture and more importantly what they weren’t doing to support a culture aligned to their values.

Tangible Benefits/Results

Many of the interventions designed and processes where the values were activated have only been implemented in the past 18 months therefore specific impact measures are difficult to illustrate, however, indicative evidence includes:

• Increased flow of applicants for customer service representative roles in Denver operations;
• Improved brand recognition amongst professional certified financial planning representatives applying for jobs with TIAA; and
• Slight increase in engagement score for items related to total rewards.

As a mission oriented financial service firm with less resources dedicated to brand marketing, these early results are deemed to be positive first steps in gaining traction and improving TIAA’s position in the talent marketplace and within the financial services firm market overall.

Why Camden Delta

Camden Delta was selected as the program manager for this effort sponsored by their CEO, because of the breadth and depth in understanding the integration of culture and human capital strategy/management. Additionally, TIAAwas attracted to Camden Delta’s flexible and pragmatic approach to solving problems and the “relatability” to their internal team.

Lastly, Camden Delta was able to demonstrate to key stakeholders a practical plan and roadmap of “how to” integrate values into key business processes including Talent Acquisition, Diversity & Inclusion and Total Reward.