Exceptional Culture
How Terra Proved Its Agency Culture Travels Across Time Zones
For a team spread across countries and time zones, an anonymous employee culture survey gave Terra's leaders real proof of the workplace culture they'd built, one strong enough to hold together without anyone sharing a room.
Company
Terra
Contact
Remy Bernstein
Industry
Digital Marketing
Location
New York, USA
Overview
Truth, Support, and Getting Out of the Way
Remy Bernstein, co-founder of Terra, judges a healthy agency culture by three tests. The first is honesty: can people tell the truth? Clients get candid answers, teammates say when something isn't working, and leadership hears about problems while they're still small.
The second is support. Agency work moves fast and the deadlines are real, so when someone is underwater, three people notice, and one of them steps in without being asked.
The third is trust. Terra hires people with a strong point of view, and to Remy, agency culture is simply what happens when leadership gets out of their way.
Why Agency Workplaces
Replacing a Hunch With Proof
Terra's leaders had a hunch their culture was strong, but a hunch is a weak thing to run a 75-person company on. The team is distributed across several countries and continents, and it's easy for two people at the top to hear only what's said in the rooms they're in.
Agency Workplaces gave Terra an anonymous, agency-specific employee culture survey with real benchmarks, a way to learn what the whole team actually thinks, rather than what the loudest or most comfortable voices choose to say.
What We Learned
Where Coaching and Recognition Land
Terra expected strong results. The scores still surprised them, including a 99 in leadership health, a number that reflects how people show up for each other on an ordinary day, not just on the good ones.
For an agency working across more time zones than anyone can count, that told Terra something specific: the culture really travels. It doesn't depend on everyone being in the same room.
The biggest lesson was that the things Terra deliberately invests in, structured manager coaching and public recognition of good work, are exactly the things the team feels most.
What's Next
Turning Results Into Rhythm
1 | Share the full results with the whole team, because they earned them. A 99 in leadership health reflects how people show up for each other every day, and they should see it in writing. |
2 | Double down on what scored highest: more structured coaching, more visible recognition of good work, and more room for people to shape their own growth paths. |
3 | Build the survey into an annual rhythm, so Terra can keep measuring what's working and keep raising the bar. |
4 | Use the recognition itself, in recruiting and with clients, as proof that the way Terra treats its team is the way it treats everyone it works with. |
Tips for Building Great Culture
Advice From the Co-Founder's Desk
• Hire people who are better than you at their jobs, then let them do those jobs.
• Be curious, not judgmental, especially when someone brings you bad news.
• Celebrate wins in public and give hard feedback in private, and do both more often than feels natural.
• Measure the culture the same way you'd measure a client campaign, with a real instrument and a baseline, because “everyone seems happy” is a guess.
• Remember that culture is set by what leaders tacitly endorse, so the fastest way to improve it is to look at what you've been letting slide.
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