The Diligent Experience: Growth, Transformation & Culture

During the last 15 months or so, I’ve been sharing a lot about growth and transformation at Diligent. Last week, we brought the entire Diligent team together virtually for a fun week-long interactive experience to stack hands and blast off into our next chapter as the largest Modern Governance, Risk, Compliance and ESG company. I’m really proud of how we pulled it off and want to share how the experience unfolded ..?

Scaling Up

As a company, we have experienced significant growth through a massive demand for our products, a series of strategic acquisitions, core innovation, and emerging partnerships, transforming from an industry leader in governance software to a sector-defining platform for Modern Governance, Risk, Compliance and ESG.

Our executive team has expanded with the addition of Lisa Edwards, as President and COO, and we added new expertise to our board with the addition of Yvette Hollingsworth Clark. We welcomed Blackstone as a new investor, while existing investors Clearlake Capital and Insight Partners deepened their commitment. Our customer base expanded by an incredible 50 percent. And our revenue and valuation continue to rise.

Nurturing Our People and Our Culture

All this change, especially two transformational acquisitions, has meant we have a lot of new faces. Integrating teams and melding cultures takes intentional, deliberate work and investment–even more so when you are doing it in a mostly remote work environment.

To meet this challenge, in March, we revamped and expanded our onboarding process emphasizing a cohort-based approach to maximize the time new hires spent in the “same (albeit virtual) room,” to learn from one another and inquire together from those providing information. In addition to building cross-functional relationships from day one, we put new hires through a board meeting and governance simulation to learn our products while fostering an appreciation for constantly walking in the shoes of our customers.

As part of our new onboarding process I get the opportunity to meet with each new hire cohort virtually, and make a point of not just welcoming new hires to Diligent, but also sharing my ambition for the company in hopes it makes them feel more welcome and invested in our collective work. And I am happy to say, the new onboarding is a hit!

Our new onboarding was so well received, in fact, a curious thing happened. Team members already at Diligent started asking whether they could go through the onboarding process.

The Diligent Experience

The week of October 4th?everyone on the Diligent team did exactly that .. re-onboarded through a week-long, cohort-based experience. The agenda included a fresh look at our company with our new expanded Governance, Risk, Compliance and ESG remit. We dove into our refreshed mission and vision and participated in an immersive, high-adrenaline customer simulation. The week culminated in “The Great BBQ Challenge of 2021” where each cohort crafted creative responses to that inevitable “What does Diligent do?” question from family or friends at a BBQ (or cookout or braai depending on where you live).

The team is energized and united by the common starting point for this new, exciting chapter as we work as One Diligent to give leaders a connected view of their organization through Modern Governance, Risk and Compliance and ESG technology that sparks the insights they need to lead with purpose.

Crafted for the Diligent-wide employee experience, here is our new brand story as told by our executive team: