Leaseweb
culture
strategy
expression
Feb 2018
Story: Leaseweb
As Leaseweb grew from Europe to the USA and Asia, the ambition was clear: build one shared heartbeat across a global team. Through BR-ND Kitchens and 23plusone sessions, we helped uncover the values already connecting colleagues, and sparked an internal culture movement that could travel across time zones, human by human.
Leaseweb
The technology was already global. The culture was still a tiny bit local. Leaseweb had grown from Amsterdam into the US and Asia, with servers and clients spanning continents. What hadn't quite caught up was the invisible thing that decides whether a global company actually feels global: the sense that a colleague in Manassas and a colleague in Amsterdam are doing the same work, for the same reasons.
That's not an org chart problem. That's a brand culture problem, and it doesn't get solved by a town hall.
Listening from Manassas to Amsterdam
We went to the places where the work actually happens. Same conversation, different time zones. Through BR-ND Kitchen sessions we brought teams together to talk about what they reached for on a good day at Leaseweb, and what they pushed against on a bad one.
Using 23plusone we tested which of the 24 fundamental human drivers were already alive across the offices, and which only lived in some. Mastery showed up everywhere. Reliability, unsurprisingly for a cloud company, showed up everywhere. And a quieter driver turned out to be the shared signal under all the local accents: belonging. The thing that makes someone in a data centre at 3am on a Sunday feel part of something, not just on shift.
"Through the sessions with BR-ND People, we discovered that despite the thousands of miles between us, we share exactly the same passions and drivers." Leaseweb brand ambassador
A culture that travels, then an ambassador network to carry it
Out of that came a shared culture story and, crucially, people to carry it. We trained a group of brand ambassadors inside Leaseweb to run this as an ongoing movement rather than a launch event. They became the internal Culture Club: a standing group that keeps the shared values in circulation, across time zones, long after the launch-day PowerPoint was closed.
That shift matters. A culture you launch dies by the next reorg. A culture owned by a recognisable group of people inside the company keeps writing itself.
View the Leaseweb brand book on Issuu
Building one culture across many time zones?
If your organisation has grown internationally faster than its shared story has, and colleagues across regions are quietly working from slightly different assumptions about what the company is actually for, there's a way to surface the real shared ground and build an internal ambassador network to hold it. Let's talk about it.
Reach out to Kim or Alexander if you're looking for something similar