Canada (EN)
Since its inception, Alight has been on a continuous journey of innovation, creativity and transformation. It’s what made us a leader in benefits administration and earned us the trust of many of the world’s largest organizations and over 30 million of their people. Through it all, our culture and values have led the way, guiding behavior, influencing decisions and aligning our colleagues toward a shared purpose.
As we look to the future and building the foundation for executing against our three operating principles—deliver service and operational excellence, innovate products that create real value and actionable insights and build relationships that result in enduring, trusted partnerships—we determined it was time to refresh our values.
Shaping the conversation
From the start, this wasn’t going to be a top-down exercise. For our values to drive real cultural transformation that leads to ongoing success, they had to be built from the input of the people who will be living them every day—our colleagues. The process began with an all-colleague survey, followed by virtual focus groups and more surveys, all undertaken with one goal in mind—to gain an understanding of what it would take to build the kind of company our employees have always wanted to work for.
During our annual Sales Kickoff in February, our Executive Leadership Team (ELT) and Extended Leadership Team (XLT) met to analyze the results. With some help from AI, we distilled 13,000 comments from the Glint survey into some fundamental learnings. For example, our colleagues feel Alight is a company defined by its people, yet the culture can feel uncertain and fragmented. And while they believe in culture as a driver of performance, many colleagues are looking for more clarity, consistency and authenticity.
With these learnings in tow, we then co-created a values and behaviors framework. We identified two themes for each of the letters in “Alight” and voted on which best encapsulates the values that will light the way to ongoing success. These values were subsequently pressure-tested with over 1,000 colleagues across tenure and levels in a series of focus groups. Their feedback enabled us to refine the descriptors, resulting in a set of values and behaviors that align with what our colleagues want—a culture that feels supportive, stable and like a “winning team” again.
Spelling out our values
Each letter in “Alight” represents a core value that is purposeful, human and united in promoting the inclusive culture our colleagues want and the promises our clients expect. They are easy to remember and give everyone a shared language for culture and behavior.
The new values were activated companywide in June, but that’s just the beginning of Alight’s culture transformation. Over the coming months, our people leaders will utilize interactive toolkits to activate the values through a series of monthly deep dive conversations with their teams. It’s all about making the values real for colleagues so they are not just words on a wall, but a compass that guides them in their day-to-day interactions with clients—and with each other. By showing up and living those values every day, we will ensure that we deliver on our promise of a world-class benefits experience.
