How Hanna Andersson transformed its culture from the top down

Since 1983, Hanna Andersson has been championing childhood. Their premium children’s clothing is designed to be played in, loved, and handed down again and again. Known for their vibrant designs, the brand has built a reputation around a clear purpose: creating a world where children feel empowered to explore, discover, and grow. One where we celebrate the pure, wholesome joys of childhood and the moments that spark wonder, imagination, and adventure.

When Davida Lindsay-Bell joined as Chief People Officer in April 2023, she immediately recognized the need to restore clarity, cohesion, and trust across the organization. She had led complex cultural transformations before — including at SFMOMA and Imperfect Foods — where she partnered with Culture Amp to rebuild leadership alignment, operationalize culture, and establish data-driven performance systems. With Hanna Andersson facing years of leadership turnover, a shift toward digital operations, and a workforce spread across 26 states, she knew the organization would require the same level of rigor and intentionality.

One of Davida’s first strategic priorities was reestablishing a foundation of trust and continuous listening — not as a one-time reset, but as an operating discipline. This work was sponsored in close partnership with the CEO, reinforcing that culture and performance were enterprise priorities, not “HR initiatives.” The true catalyst for change was her leadership philosophy: methodical listening, radical transparency, and a commitment to reshaping how leaders show up every day.

Challenge: Creating a common Hanna Andersson experience

The path that led Hanna Andersson to this moment had been turbulent. A period of sustained senior executive leadership turnover left employees cynical and fatigued. Without a common purpose or clearly articulated values, there was no foundation for a unified culture. And they didn’t have the HR infrastructure to easily build one, either.

The dispersed nature of the remote workforce added another layer of complexity to Davida’s undertaking. Employees were spread across 26 states, all with diverse experiences. There was the Portland, Oregon headquarters with its social activism roots, working with the more conservative Louisville, Kentucky distribution center, where an additional language divide existed: 80% of the workforce was Cuban and Spanish-speaking.

“One of the biggest challenges was creating one common Hanna Andersson experience across a connected culture and a very distributed workforce. So diversity – although it's one of our core strengths – also posed a challenge” – Davida Lindsay-Bell, Chief People Officer, Hanna Andersson

Davida knew the path forward wouldn’t be driven by quick fixes or surface-level interventions. The organization needed a disciplined, data-driven way to understand what employees were actually experiencing — and to hold leaders accountable for responding. Culture Amp provided the foundation for that work, giving leaders real-time insight and the clarity to act on that philosophy at scale.

Approach: A framework for transformation

Working alongside Hanna Andersson’s CEO to shape a new vision for the organization, Davida began to establish a baseline of feedback that her team could use to initiate the cultural transformation. She worked within a framework she developed called LARA ™, which became the operating discipline for how leaders listened, made sense of data and acted:

• Listen: Gather data and feedback from across the organization.
• Absorb: Sit with the results – however uncomfortable – without immediately jumping to solutions.
• Respond: Make sense of what you’ve learned to determine the right path forward.
• Act: Follow through on your plan of action to enact visible change.

We leverage everything [in Culture Amp] to try to build an organization of continuous feedback. It’s a way for the CEO and I to hold our executive team and our senior leaders accountable. – Davida Lindsay-Bell, Chief People Officer, Hanna Andersson

Step 1: Listen

Davida used Culture Amp’s engagement surveys, alongside HRIS and lifecycle data, to identify organization-wide patterns across geography, demographics, and tenure. Listening was embedded across the entire employee journey from 30-60-90 day onboarding check-ins to engagement and exit surveys, ensuring leaders could understand how experiences evolved over time, not just as a single moment. What emerged were consistent gaps in leadership clarity, alignment, and performance expectations. Signals that change would need to be systemic, not isolated in shaping a consistent experience for all employees.

Step 2: Absorb

Hanna Andersson’s leaders would have to unlearn old practices and adopt new ways of working together. This required executives to absorb all feedback they collected – both positive and negative – and lean into the natural discomfort that comes along with change to make the transformation successful, resisting the instinct to immediately explain or defend. Culture Amp’s reporting made it possible for leaders to sit with the uncomfortable truths revealed in the data, confront patterns honestly, and build a shared understanding before taking action. This pause became a leadership discipline, not a delay tactic.

Step 3: Respond

Leveraging the new feedback, Davida and the executives came together to establish a shared purpose: becoming champions of childhood made to last. They embedded a “red thread” of new cultural values that connected everyone across the organization, calling on all employees to be bold, adventurous, curious, inclusive, enduring, and warmhearted. Values designed to not only inspire, but to guide decisions and behaviors.

Step 4: Act

Davida understood that simply crafting a new cultural vision wouldn’t be enough. Real change had to come from the top down – and the executive team had to commit to visible action if they wanted to build the Hanna Andersson experience they believed in.

“Our employees would not just believe in the story – no matter how compelling the story was. They had to see us as executives and senior leaders live it out in real time. It wasn't just about operational resets, but about how we go about reshaping our thought process and how we show up with one another.” – Davida Lindsay-Bell, Chief People Officer, Hanna Andersson

Solution: Putting values into practice

Leadership behaviors became the accelerant for organizational change. Davida focused on having leaders model humility, vulnerability, and courage. But modeling wasn't enough. The team also took concrete actions to transform how the organization operated.

Establishing psychological safety

Just 30 days into her role, Davida brought in a keynote speaker, Dr. Timothy Clark, to present a model on psychological safety. Dr. Clark introduced a four-stage framework that gave the executive team a shared language for the culture they wanted to build, leveraging:

• Inclusion safety: People feel valued and accepted for who they are.
• Learner safety: People feel safe to ask questions and make mistakes.
• Contributor safety: People feel empowered to contribute skills and ideas.
• Challenge safety: People feel safe to challenge the status quo and raise concerns.

This moment signaled a shift: under Davida’s leadership, psychological safety wasn’t a talking point — it was becoming the standard for how leaders communicated, made decisions, and held one another accountable.

Creating channels for co-creation

Rather than simply announcing the new purpose and values, the team included the entire Hanna Andersson community through listening sessions, office hours, and roundtables by division. This offered everyone the opportunity to workshop culture by:

• Establishing buy-in: Employees saw leaders following through on their commitments, which began to build credibility.
• Inviting co-creation: The community took an active role in shaping what the new Hanna Andersson would become, creating organization-wide ownership.
• Modeling vulnerability and empathy: Leaders put themselves in employees' shoes and sat with uncomfortable feedback.
• Reinforcing transparency: Open channels demonstrated a commitment to honest dialogue.

“The existing performance management system allowed mediocrity to go unchecked. This created complacency, reinforced bias, and protected inequitable structures.” – Davida Lindsay-Bell, Chief People Officer, Hanna Andersson

Overhauling performance management

The existing five-point performance rating scale had created “the comfort of three.” Leaders felt safest giving middle-of-the-road scores, preventing the honest conversations about performance that employees needed. Redesigning performance wasn’t a procedural update — it was a cultural reset that required Davida to push leaders out of long-held habits and into honest, open dialogue about what high performance truly looks like.

Davida and her team reimagined the system through:

• Shifting the rating scale: Hanna Andersson shifted from the five-point rating scale to a four-point one, eliminating the “safe” middle ground to fall back on.
• Introducing performance rubrics: Leaders now had benchmarks to determine what good performance actually looked like across different roles.
• Implementing calibration processes: With universal calibration, performance reviews could stay consistent and fair across teams and departments.
• Adopting a new decision-making framework: Bain’s RAPID framework clarified who was responsible for which decisions, eliminating ambiguity and strengthening accountability.

Building continuous feedback

Davida and her team built continuous feedback into the organizational rhythm, turning data into a listening tool that shapes strategy in real time with:

• Lifecycle feedback from onboarding through exit: Structured check-ins at key moments (including 30-, 60-, and 90-day onboarding touchpoints and exit surveys) give leaders visibility into how employee experiences evolve over time and where intervention is needed.
• Engagement surveys twice per year: Adopting a spring and fall cadence created consistent organizational listening, plus new data to act on.
• Action planning modules: This additional opportunity for feedback gave employees a direct channel to provide real-time input between surveys.
• Accountability loops: Davida and the CEO look to feedback to gather concrete evidence that holds the executive team and senior leaders accountable, building ongoing trust.

“With Culture Amp, we are actually working through action planning and responding to employee feedback. And through the action module, we're collecting feedback from our employees leading up to the next engagement survey, all in real time.” – Davida Lindsay-Bell, Chief People Officer, Hanna Andersson

Results: When leaders shift, culture shifts

With all of these elements in place, leaders began approaching conversations with greater courage and vulnerability. The organization codified clear leadership competencies – including collaboration, inclusive emotional intelligence, proactive execution, and customer centricity – anchoring the new way of leading into how the organization operates.

Even amid one of the most turbulent macroeconomic environments in recent memory – marked by retail headwinds, shifting consumer behavior, and ongoing cost pressures – Hanna Andersson achieved:

• 8 percentage point increase in engagement scores
• Measurable improvement across all 16 engagement factors, including leadership, confidence in the company, alignment, enablement and inclusion
• 95% participation rate in engagement surveys
• 97% participation rate in exit surveys, far exceeding the industry standard of ~50%
• HR Transform's Connected Culture of the Year award nomination

Several engagement dimensions improved by high single to double digits, signaling a broad-based, systemic shift rather than isolated gains.

These results weren’t accidental. They were a direct reflection of the leadership behaviors Davida championed — courage, vulnerability, clarity, and systemic accountability — and the consistency with which they were modeled across the executive team.

This lift is especially notable – Culture Amp data shows that most organizations saw engagement scores stall or decline during the same period. Culture Amp’s insights, action planning capabilities, and continuous feedback loops helped Hanna Andersson build resilience, agility, and trust at a time when many companies were struggling to maintain morale.

But even with such high scores, Davida and her team aren’t getting complacent. They understand that sustainable culture isn’t a finish line to reach. Instead, it’s a daily practice that’s modeled through leadership behavior and driven by perpetual curiosity.

For Hanna Andersson, Culture Amp became the mechanism for embracing that curiosity. The tools have created real-time feedback loops, made employee data actionable, and built trust through consistent follow-through. And, as the world gets more complex, Davida and her team have a strong foundation to fall back on, continually building organizational agility, embedding culture, and fostering psychological safety – every single day.

“Transformation really isn't something that you can fix. It's dynamic, it's unpredictable, and it's nonlinear. But with Culture Amp, we were able to stay close to our people strategy and build the resilience that we were looking for. It not only allowed the organization to survive change, but to thrive in it.” – Davida Lindsay-Bell, Chief People Officer, Hanna Andersson