Case Study

Earning Employee Engagement for the Nation’s 3rd Largest Retailer

How we helped one of Canada’s largest grocery retailers turn its brand promises into lived experiences for 130,000+ employees.

The Summary

Goal

Strengthen brand pride and sentiment across—earning deeper engagement and better performance
Teach their internal teams how to sustainably reinforce the brand promises

Obstacle

Communication channel limitations with 100K+ deskless workers
No unified brand narrative
No framework for turning promises into consistent, authentic employee experiences at scale
Siloed corporate departments

Results

Unifying brand narrative that employees can relate to
Store-first, research-proven activation framework
Scalable model now rolling out to 1,500+ stores.

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How we helped one of Canada’s largest grocery retailers turn its brand promises into lived experiences for 130,000+ employees

This national retailer had a genuine commitment to strengthen employee pride and connection.

We supported them in understanding their positioning as an employer and articulating their desired employer value proposition.

But the real challenge is empowering everyone who contributes to the employee experience to walk the talk.

That meant uniting thousands of employees—from HR and Operations to Communications and Store Leaders—around a compelling narrative, and ensuring they had a system to bring the narrative to life through their work so everyone was rowing in the same direction.

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Our Approach

Emotional connection is a performance driver. Which is why we started by developing an emotionally compelling brand narrative that took form as a simple tagline, and manifesto.

But in retail, a strategy only delivers results if it’s felt on the floor.

We used our store-centric activation framework, built around the three channels that most meaningfully improve the employee experience:

Managers: 70% of the variance in team engagement and performance is determined solely by the manager.
Operations: Often overlooked as opportunities to prove your promises to be true and bring your brand to life through policies and practices.
Comms & Info Hubs: Reinforcing the experience with consistent, unified messaging.

Implementation Highlights

Developed a Unified HR Brand Activation Table that connected each HR functions work directly to this narrative, ensuring they understand and believe in the critical role they play—fostering deep personal and departmental ownership.

Translated values into operational moments and actions employees would actually experience on the floor.

Focused on existing channels—not adding more—to avoid “initiative overload.”

Employee Survey Coming Up?

What will you do differently this year to see positive change?

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