How Infinity Improved Employee Engagement with CliftonStrengths®

At Infinity Marketing, we strive for a good company culture. We want our employees to feel seen, valued, and recognized for their unique accomplishments and talents, and we believe doing so invariably leads to improved employee engagement and retention. On a strategic level, it’s always smart to invest in people.

Though our company already had a strong workplace culture with low turnover and a collaborative team, we wanted to see how we could improve it even further. The idea: what if we could find a way to help our employees understand each other – and themselves – better and use that knowledge to foster a welcoming, supportive company culture (while elevating productivity and performance as side benefits)?

The answer: employee engagement training through strategic integration of the CliftonStrengths^® system.

CliftonStrengths^® is an assessment system used to identify individuals’ personal affinities and talents. Put another way, it’s a way for people to know how they accomplish the tasks given to them. Employees take the CliftonStrengths^® Assessment and learn how they rank in 34 distinct “talent themes.” Everyone has some strength or affinity for each talent theme, but some talents are “higher” or more natural to individuals than others.

The effectiveness of CliftonStrengths^® is clearly seen in official data. According to Gallup, employees who can use their Strengths are:

• Six times as likely to be engaged at work
• Six times as likely to agree strongly that they get to do what they do best each day
• Three times as likely to report having an excellent quality of life.

Of course, these improvements have tangible, direct results on workplace productivity, company profits, and market performance.

We wanted to bring CliftonStrengths^® to Infinity to enhance our culture and make daily activities even more meaningful, engaging, and collaborative. But for it to be most effective, we couldn’t pursue this system as a half-measure – we’d need to go “all-in” and fully integrate CliftonStrengths^® into our company. Cassie Thompson, our Senior Director of People and Culture and a Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach, guided the rest of the team in taking the Assessment for the first time.

Soon after, we were collectively talking about our Strengths – especially how they seemed to describe the kinds of work we loved and the kinds of work we found challenging with uncanny accuracy!

However, this investment into a better company culture would only bear fruit for our larger company  if we committed to fusing CliftonStrengths^® with Infinity. To that end, we took steps to fully integrate CliftonStrengths^® as part of our company culture in several creative ways. For example, we:

• Brought Strengths into meetings and encouraged our team members to use Strengths language in their projects and partnerships
• Added each employee’s top five Strengths into internal email signatures – a very useful way to make the initiative visible every day
• Began using Strengths in the employee onboarding and review processes. For instance, supervisors talked with their employees about which of their Strengths were feeling good or not supported during a given review period

Our commitment to using CliftonStrengths^® led to amazing results that we still experience today. In fact, CliftonStrengths^® has become a core part of our company’s cultural fabric; employees regularly talk about their Strengths, take pride in their unique talents, and better understand peers who might not have the same Strengths as they do. Furthermore, CliftonStrengths^® led our company to begin winning workplace awards after a brief hiatus between 2017 and 2020.

From a managerial perspective, CliftonStrengths^® is an effective strategic tool supervisors can use to identify areas of improvement and offer powerful, impactful praise. Employees feel personally recognized when their Strengths are highlighted or called out – bringing the CliftonStrengths^® language into the review process makes each exchange between employees and supervisors more fruitful and has led to lower turnover compared to years prior to our adoption of the system.

Bringing CliftonStrengths^® to Infinity was a strategic decision made to empower our employees, bring our people together, and energize collaboration, leading to better engagement and retention from our team members. In all these respects, the initiative was a success – and a fantastic example of how investments in people should form a core part of any long-term company strategy.