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3 Bob London + Erik Linn: How do you translate culture into a true client benefit?

Name: 3 Bob London + Erik Linn: How do you translate culture into a true client benefit?
Uploaded: 2021-08-02T12:58:58+00:00
Duration: 18 s
Channel: Bob London
Description: In this interview, Bob London asks Erik Linn how organizational culture can be turned into a tangible benefit for clients, particularly regarding…

2 Aug 2021 · 0 min

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In this interview, Bob London asks Erik Linn how organizational culture can be turned into a tangible benefit for clients, particularly regarding retention rates. Linn explains that Cross Country built its culture from day one by establishing four core values—excellence, collaboration, energy, and impact—through working groups. These values are woven into every aspect of the firm: hiring uses behavioral interviewing to ensure new hires embody all four values; 30% of year‑end bonuses are tied to value‑aligned performance; quarterly awards recognize employees who exemplify the values; and regular social and "Coach Family" events reinforce the culture. Linn emphasizes that this deliberately crafted culture underpins the firm’s success and improves client outcomes, including higher retention.

You mentioned retention rate, and I know that we back in the day had discussions about, is culture something you lead with and how does culture translate into something substantial that actually has a benefit for your clients? I know that retention rate must be one of those things, but do you want to comment on that? Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for asking that question.
Um, yeah, we, we started very early defining our culture. And so we spent a lot of time using working groups. Within the first few months of launching the firm of really choosing the words that were meaningful to us that described our culture. And we did come up with 4 core values: excellence, collaboration, energy, and impact. And the description of those is what's most meaningful to, to our employees. But it's hard to change a culture, but it's a lot easier to create a culture from, from day one. And so we, we definitely did that. We live by those core values. Through our recruiting process, through our compensation process. And then we have several ways to reinforce culture throughout a given year, but we're really big with behavioral interviewing. So anyone who gets an offer from Cross Country is someone who hits all 4 marks. 30% of our year-end bonuses is actually tied to how someone performs their job and how they perform it in alignment with our core values, not just the what, but the how. And that's been very meaningful. We give out quarterly core value awards to the people that exemplify our values, and then we do lots of things with Coach Families and through social events to really bring those cultural values to, to life.
But they're the foundation for the firm and our success.