65% growth. New markets. Same soul.
Collaborate Global was growing fast. 65% year-on-year, with new offices opening across South Africa, the Middle East and Asia Pacific, and a client list that included some of the most recognised brands in the world.
That kind of pace is exciting. It’s also the moment a lot of agencies start to lose what made them good. The culture that exists when a founding team sits around the same table doesn’t automatically survive when the headcount doubles, the team goes global, and the founding directors can’t be everywhere at once.
Collaborate knew this. They wanted to protect what they had built, and make sure it travelled with every new hire, every new market, every new chapter.
HappyHQ joined as an embedded People and Culture Partner for 18 months, leading on people-first culture strategy. Not as an external consultant with a one-off brief. As part of the team, working alongside Collaborate through a period of significant change.
The work followed a clear approach: start by unearthing what already exists, then name it, build it into the language and systems of the business, and make sure it shows up everywhere, not just on the walls.
Unearthing the stories
Before anything was built, we listened. Workshops with the team, conversations across the business, digging into the moments and memories that showed what Collaborate was about. We also educated the team on why values matter for brands — not as a nice-to-have, but as the thing that holds a business together when it’s growing fast. You can’t protect a culture you haven’t properly understood.
Naming the behaviours
A value is only useful if people know what it looks like in practice. We developed a full values guide that defined specific behaviours for each value, and brought them to life with real stories from the Collaborate team. Not abstract principles. Examples of what good looks like, and what it doesn’t.
Getting it into the language of the business
Values that live in corporate language die in corporate language. We worked with Collaborate to put their values in their own words, so the whole team could own them, not just the people who wrote them.
Pressure testing
It’s not a value if there’s no trade-off. We ran values-in-action workshops that pushed the team to think about what each value demands. That thinking sparked ideas across every corner of the business: interview kits, recognition awards, onboarding modules, merch, away-day activations, 1:1 prompts, and performance management frameworks.
Getting it off the walls and into everything
Alongside the values work, HappyHQ supported Collaborate on comms throughout their growth: playbooks, blogs, thought leadership, and Sunday Times Best Place to Work submissions. They won. Twice.
The culture travelled. That was the goal.
The biggest shift was that the culture stopped depending on proximity to the founders. New team members joining in Johannesburg or Dubai or Sydney understood what Collaborate stood for from day one, not because someone told them, but because it was built into how the business worked.
The values became something people used. To make decisions. To have difficult conversations. To recognise each other. That’s a different thing from values that sit on a poster.
And because HappyHQ was embedded rather than dropped in, the work didn’t stay as a one-off exercise. It became part of how Collaborate operates.