Customer Story

How puppetry helped 15Five infuse meetings with fun to more effectively educate employees, drive participation, and increase team cohesion

15Five exists to accelerate human-centered leadership in the world, so that companies and their people can thrive. A big believer of practicing what they preach, this pioneering B2B SaaS provider, understood the need to have their people thrive ever since they launched in 2011. That’s why they had been remote-first from the start, and cultivated many rituals and cultural experiences that encouraged people to share openly and authentically. The result was a high-performing culture where people created close connections and collaborated well together, despite the physical distance.

About

15Five is the performance management platform that drives business results. 15Five’s platform combines coaching and manager training, 360° performance reviews, in-depth engagement surveys, robust goal & OKR tracking, and manager-employee feedback tools like 1-on-1s and pulse ratings. Together, these enable HR leaders to deliver better business outcomes through high employee performance, engagement, and retention while empowering managers to drive change from the bottom up. 15Five is loved by strategic HR leaders, managers, and employees at over 3,500 companies, including Credit Karma, HubSpot, and Pendo.

Benefits

  • Virtual Off-Site

    Brought the team together in shared celebration and laughter to keep momentum strong going into H2 2023

  • L&D

    Locked in learning of a new internal process for creating design briefs to more easily and efficiently create marketing collateral

  • In-Person

    Live presentation of employee-led social media initiative that resulted in measurable growth in several of 15Five’s marketing channels

“David (and Little Ginger) have a way of presenting information that captivates the attention of an audience in a way I have not seen before. Meetings with these puppets become events that the team wants to attend. “

Mike Pilarz, Sr. Director of Corporate Marketing at 15Five

  • In 2022, after a two-year hiatus, 15Five resumed their annual in-person retreat. At the same time, 15Five was launching an employee-led advocacy initiative to have employees share company news and content like eBooks and podcast episodes on social media. The company took advantage of having two-hundred of their employees all in one room to kick-off the initiative.

    They enlisted David Mizne, founder of culturepuppets.com, and his primary puppet, “Little Ginger”, to announce the social media advocacy contest.

    As a result, participation in the advocacy program skyrocketed, resulting in a significant increase in impressions and followers on social media and click throughs to their content and web pages. Also as a result, 15Five’s HR Superstars podcast ranked in the top 50 Management shows in Apple Podcasts for the first time.

  • In 2023, after hiring a new design lead for the corporate communications team, the 15Five marketing team launched a new internal process for submitting creative briefs. The goal was to set up the creative team to succeed and help the marketing managers make a bigger impact.. Like any new process, there was a bit of a learning curve and adoption of the process was not universal.

    Little Ginger was again brought in, this time to do a virtual presentation of “The Briefie Awards” for the marketing team of about twenty people. The awards celebrated the most strategic, effective creative briefs, using positive psychology, fun and humor to model the desired behavior and get the rest of the team bought in. David worked with the design lead to understand which employees had created the best creative briefs during H1 2023. He created slides for Little Ginger to present via Zoom, in a spoof of the Academy Awards. Additionally, the puppet educated the team on the elements that specifically contribute to a well-written creative brief. As a result, the design team has been able to create assets with greater speed and efficiency.

  • 15Five held a half-day virtual retreat in July of 2023 and presented a slide deck to recap the wins from the first half of the year and to generate excitement for the coming two quarters. This was also a kick-off of a company-wide initiative to have more fun.They enlisted Culture Puppets to perform a hilarious presentation of the H1 wins that included employee spotlights for:

    • Product awards won

    • Celebrating the launching a major initiative

    • Top sales performers and financial benchmarks

    • Spotlight of creative endeavors outside of work

    Culture Puppets researched the various team-members for their efforts and personal stories to add depth and humor to the presentation. The content was delivered to the delight of the participants and the energy of the meeting was elevated for the next part of the presentation—a fireside chat with company leaders.

“When we planned our 2023 virtual retreat with so many wins to celebrate, we knew that we had to do something special. David and his puppets performed and, even over a Zoom call, we could all feel the energy lifting. You could see it on the faces of attendees and read it in the many comments expressing gratitude and joy. Our team loves Culture Puppets!”

Jennie May Yang, SVP of People & Culture at 15Five

About Culture Puppets

Culture Puppets is dedicated to growing more cohesive cultures and successful teams by bringing humor and magic to town hall meetings, trainings, kickoffs, team-building events, and virtual off-sites. Pioneers in PaaS (puppetry as a service), Culture Puppets is the only company to offer this ancient art-form in the corporate space and to harness the power of humor to bring people together around a shared purpose. Culture Puppets, a division of Puppet Business, LLC, was founded by David Mizne, who pairs a deep knowledge of the people and culture space with a decade of experience performing with puppets at dozens of in-person and virtual events.