Exceptional Culture
How Working Planet Built a Feedback Culture That Actually Changes Things
Two years into new leadership, the Providence-based digital agency went looking for honest answers and found them, confirming what their team already believed and uncovering the specific actions needed to keep improving.
Company
Working Planet
Contact
Courtney Lenhardt, COO
Industry
Digital Marketing
Location
Providence, USA
Overview
Why Agency Workplaces
A Fresh Set of Eyes on Familiar Ground
When Courtney Lenhardt and CEO Emma Davis took over management of Working Planet nearly two years ago, they inherited a team and a culture. They also inherited the question every new leadership team faces: how do we actually know what people think?
The answer they landed on was to ask, and to keep asking. Working Planet solicits regular feedback from staff, but Lenhardt recognized that internal channels have limits. Partnering with Agency Workplaces offered a different angle: an independent, third-party view that might surface things the usual process would not.
The goal was not to validate what they already believed. It was to find the gaps they might be missing, and to give the team a channel to speak honestly outside the structure of direct management.
What We Learned
Reassuring Confirmation and Clear Next Steps
The results landed in a way Lenhardt found genuinely reassuring. The picture that came back was largely consistent with what leadership already believed, which told her something important: the team is open and honest with us. That alignment between internal perception and external findings is not something every agency gets to confirm.
But the survey also delivered something more valuable than reassurance. New ideas surfaced, and with them, specific areas to act on. Three stood out clearly: creating a formal channel for peer recognition, finding ways to actively support staff health and wellbeing beyond just time off, and building better cross-training infrastructure to distribute workloads more evenly.
What made those findings useful was not just that they were named, but that they pointed directly to action. For a team that values real outcomes over good intentions, having clear and concrete next steps is the most valuable thing a program like this can produce.
What's Next
Already Moving, Still Building
1 | A peer recognition form has already been launched in Slack, giving team members a dedicated way to show appreciation for each other. |
2 | Develop resources and conversations around wellbeing and recharging, going beyond PTO to support how people actually recover and sustain their energy. |
3 | Document key processes to support cross-training and make workload distribution more flexible across the team. |
4 | Continue leveraging the Senior Programmer to build internal tools that create efficiency and give time back to the team. |
Tips for Building Great Culture
What Working Planet Would Tell Other Agencies
Be yourself. When people see that you are a real person who owns your mistakes and genuinely cares about them, they become far more willing to tell you what they actually think. Psychological safety starts at the top.
Ask for feedback and then do something with it. Taking action on what you hear is what keeps people talking. If they share concerns and nothing changes, and there is no explanation for why it did not, they will stop giving you feedback. Either act or explain, but never just go quiet.
Look to frameworks that make feedback a practice, not an event. Working Planet credits the principles of Radical Candor by Kim Scott as a foundation for how they approach their feedback culture. Having a shared language and approach for honest, caring communication makes a real difference.
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