CASE STUDIES / MADISON REED
CASE STUDY · CONSUMER BEAUTY · RETAIL & DIRECT TO CONSUMER
One Company, Three Workforces. They Were Not Having The Same Experience.
Madison Reed
San Francisco, California
Salons nationwide
Madison Reed sells hair color direct to consumers and runs its own salons. Corporate staff, salon colorists and remote color consultants share an employer and almost nothing else. We measured them separately, because averaging them would have hidden the only thing worth knowing.
SECTOR
Consumer beauty · direct to consumer and company-owned salons
PROFILE
Corporate HQ, salons across the country, remote consultant team
ENGAGEMENT
Multi-year partnership, 2020–2024
SERVICES
Employee listening · organizational design · leadership advisory · company-wide training
IN BRIEF
What Changed.
Madison Reed roughly tripled in size while we worked together. Their people sit in three very different jobs, and what is true for one group is routinely untrue for the others.
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They hired us to find out what was actually happening inside each one, and to build something their own employees could run without us.
A measurement design that reported each workforce separately rather than averaging them into one number.
An employee committee with paid time, defined scope and named roles, not volunteers working after hours.
Company-wide training whose effect showed up in the following year’s data and held.
THE CHALLENGE
An Average Across Three Workforces Describes Nobody.
Most engagement reporting produces one company-wide number. At Madison Reed that number would have been actively misleading, because the company contains three populations whose working lives have almost nothing in common.
Corporate
Salaried, office-based, physically close to leadership. The population executives can see and talk to without trying.
Salon Teams
Hourly colorists and receptionists, on their feet, one to one with a paying customer for hours at a time, scattered across the country.
Remote Consultants
Color consultants and support staff working by phone and chat. Closest to the customer, furthest from headquarters.
Madison Reed also had the problem every employee committee eventually has. The people who care most volunteer their time, their managers notice the hours, and the work quietly stops being possible.
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They hired us to build a people strategy. The first decision that mattered was refusing to report a single number.
THE APPROACH
Measure Each Population. Fund The People Doing The Work. Train Everyone.
We ran this across several consecutive agreements rather than as a single project, and designed each stage so Madison Reed could carry it forward themselves.
We measure each workforce separately, and we report it that way.
The instrument was built so results could be cut by population, by location and by role, then reported back the same way. A company-wide average would have shown a healthy organization. Reading the workforces apart showed where the real variation was, and it was not where leadership expected.
01
We do not ask people to do this work in their spare time.
We wrote a charter that defined the committee’s time commitment as a percentage of paid work hours, named every role, assigned an executive sponsor to each area, and tied participation to performance reviews. That last point is the one that matters. It removes the manager objection structurally instead of asking people to negotiate it individually, and it is the single most common reason employee committees fail.
02
We train the whole company, not just the people who volunteered.
We delivered company-wide sessions across every population, scheduled around salon hours and shift patterns rather than the corporate calendar. A program that only reaches the people who already agree with it is a program that changes nothing.
03
We put the same questions to the executive team directly.
Alongside the survey we ran individual conversations with the C-suite. Two independent instruments, one anonymous and one face to face, reaching the same conclusion in the same quarter is a much harder thing for an organization to set aside than either one alone.
04
We hand over the structure, not just the findings.
The committee, the charter, the role definitions and the annual measurement cadence were all built to run without us. The test is whether the structure survives the people who founded it leaving, and at Madison Reed it did.
05
WHAT CHANGED
Measuring Three Years Running Is What Made Any Of This Provable.
We do not publish survey results for this client. What we can tell you is what moved, and what the company did about it.
THE TRAINING SHOWED UP IN THE DATA
The measure closest to the training rose sharply, then held.
How equipped employees felt to handle difficult situations at work rose steeply in the year we delivered company-wide sessions, and it had not decayed when we measured again the following year. It was the largest single movement anywhere in the three years.
THE STRUCTURE OUTLASTED ITS FOUNDERS
Successive cohorts kept the committee running through turnover.
Chairs rotated, sponsors changed, and people left the company. The committee kept meeting, kept recruiting and kept working its own agenda, because it had a charter, funded time and named owners rather than momentum.
THE COMPANY WAS RECOGNIZED FOR IT
Named a Newsweek Most Loved Workplace during our engagement
The recognition landed mid-partnership, and Madison Reed’s own internal record ties it to the work the committee and the wider program were doing.
The most useful finding was one a single company-wide score would have buried completely. The sharpest variation was not between headquarters and the field, which is what everyone expected. It was between one salon and another. Two locations doing the same job under the same policies with the same customers produced experiences at opposite ends of the range, which points at local management rather than corporate policy. That is a fixable problem, and you only find it if you refuse to average.
WHAT THEY KEPT
We Built It So Madison Reed Could Carry It Themselves.
The measure of this kind of work is what remains once the consultant stops invoicing. Madison Reed finished holding four things they did not have when we started, and the company has roughly tripled again since.
A funded committee.
Chartered, with paid time, named roles, executive sponsors and a recruitment pipeline built into the annual survey.
Measurement that segments.
An instrument and a reporting habit that reads the workforces apart instead of averaging them together.
Trained managers everywhere.
Company-wide sessions delivered across corporate, salon and remote teams rather than to headquarters alone.
An annual listening cadence.
A repeatable cycle they now run on their own platform, with the comparability to see movement year over year.
THE OUTCOME
They Can Read Their Own Company Now, One Workforce At A Time.
Madison Reed started this partnership unable to say with confidence what any of its three populations believed. They finished it running an annual measurement cycle on their own platform, with a funded employee body to act on what it finds and a leadership team accustomed to hearing the results broken apart rather than blended.
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That capability matters more the bigger they get. A company-wide score is least reliable exactly when a company is growing fastest, because the newest and most distant employees are the ones an average is most likely to drown out.
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If your organization runs more than one kind of job, your engagement number is probably describing your headquarters. That is the first thing we would look at.
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