theSHIFT and YCN were tasked with bringing to life a set of values that could unite Frieze and deliver on their ambition of being “the place where creative people most want to work.”
Challenge
To be expected from a cultural institution, Frieze has evolved and changed a lot since its inception. Starting as a disruptive independent company, Frieze is often praised for uniting London’s art scene in the mid noughties.
In 2016 it was acquired by Endeavour which enabled its global expansion and accelerated its impact – but also oriented the organisation towards greater commerciality.
This culture shift was compounded with the acquisition of 2 new fairs in 2023, putting even more of a strain on the culture with employees needing to manage multiple stakeholders and deadlines across timezones.
Some employees started to feel that Frieze had lost its focus and some of its spark.
APPROACH
For the values to truly impact the culture, employees need to feel a sense of ownership over them – they need to be involved in the journey. And, on a practical level, the language which is likely to resonate the most will come from people working at Frieze, not an external consultant.
Our role was to provide inspiration and a framework for brilliant conversations and ideas to emerge.
We interviewed senior employees enabling us to get a sense of how the organisation was viewed from the top. Our main working group, however, was made up of volunteers across the company, in different departments and timezones.
We ran several virtual workshops on Miro, allowing employees to explore Frieze’s culture and identify what makes it uniquely special – ultimately landing on three fertile territories.
Values are only meaningful insofar as they inspire action. One way to ensure that the values are more than just words on a page is to involve employees in the design of related behaviours to help them understand how to activate them into their day-to-day.
IMPACT
We often describe the creation of the values as the first step in their journey. What’s more important is what happens afterwards.
To support the ongoing embedding of the values we designed a learning programme with their partners YCN to teach managers new tools that would help them bring to life each of value.
And through the Frieze Values Awards – a new ritual to help embed the importance of the values into daily life – we have heard lots of great examples of colleagues living the values.
Sophie used the value of connect the dots to deliver the printed map and signage for Frieze Los Angeles. She was a balanced point of coordination in a time of chaos, representing Frieze professionally with external vendors at a time when information and timelines were constantly changing, while supporting the Design, Exhibitors and Production teams in coordinating, amending and proofing dozens of different versions of the same assets, always with impeccable attention to detail.
Tate who works across both The Armory Show and EXPO Chicago and displayed the values of over-communicate during the integration of the VIP program and strategies
to EXPO CHICAGO. Tate took the time to understand the goals of the Frieze VIP team and to communicate regularly with the EXPO team to learn more about how to bring the two ideologies together. Additionally, while working through the needs of EXPO, Tate has maintained support for The Armory Show. Tate shows up with ideas, flexibility, and the best positive attitude always.
