Envision your win.

We help you build the strategy to get there.

We'll show you how

Get to impact—fast. Our clients are CEOs, leaders from public and private companies, investors, and boards invested in seeing transformation strategy that delivers real value. We’ve helped clients that are large and small, local and global, for profit and for impact across industries, professions and social causes. 
‍
The common denominator is the desire for change—big change. Along the way, we’ve launched ventures, helped companies go from survive to thrive and helped leaders plan and deliver bold and sustainable growth for their organizations.  

See what our clients are saying about our work

"We loved working with the Human at Work team! Their process, insight, positive energy and commitment to our team’s “win” was palpable every time they stepped on to our floor. We called them “the humans” because interacting with them on our journey to articulate our “why” felt human in all senses of the word. Our strategy on “how” and our initiatives as “whats” was a game-changing reframe to both our leadership team and the team as a whole."

—Robin Roschke

"We approached the Human at Work team right after making our first acquisition. Over 3 weeks, the team reviewed the brand’s business, conducted in depth interviews and identified where there was fuel in the organization to build on our ambitious plan and where we needed to focus on near-term priorities in our strategy. As an investor in a brand, their role as an outside player was invaluable and their approach is universal, regardless of where you are in the world. They are a positive, insightful, articulate and purpose-led team. Can’t wait to work with them again!"

—Dustin Jones

"As a startup founder and CEO, there's a lot I know I don't know. I absolutely seek out exceptional people to help strengthen my role every day. Lâle Kesebi is a valued and trusted advisor to Forkast.News ... and me. She inspires and guides, speaks the truth, and empowers that desire in corporate culture. Some call her the CEO Whisperer—not only for her skills and aptitude, but most of all as a trusted advisor and corporate culture architect."

—Angie Lau

"The Human at Work team are real masters of their craft: leading and building human-centered businesses with purpose. Lâle and Karen facilitated our strategy lab session and made it many things: inclusive, fun, driven, punchy—but most of all, wonderfully clarifying. We always had the people and the passion. But now we have an articulated purpose and, best of all, a plan that the whole team had a say in creating. Brilliant. Thank you Human at Work!"

—Kay McArdle

"When we first started talking with Karen and Yi Hoo about our desire to bring out the best in our people and our business, we were inspired by how to operationalize our culture. Human at Work’s Culture Audit helped us solidify ideas about how we could build on the fuel in our organization and highlighted obstacles to address in the region. They introduced ways we could design and experiment with our culture to build on our strong values and create an even stronger sense of belonging and contribution at JEB. We love Human at Work’s energy, ideas and methods for building potential and our inspirational interactions."

—Rob Wall

Globally, Steelcase has a powerful and focussed brand purpose: to unlock human promise. Our work with the Human at Work team concentrated on what our purpose means to our teams in the Asia Pacific region and how it can help us to spark a competitive advantage and how we can embed it in our organization and on day to day work activities. We have values that we strongly believe in and a strong culture that we know that we can amplify with our purpose. We're grateful to the Human at Work team for supporting Steelcase on this journey and we look forward to where it takes us in the future!

—Patrick Woo

OUR WORK

Aligning purpose to fuel performance.

We helped HSBC clearly define a breakthrough transformation by aligning and embedding their purpose into their organization.

We worked with the highly engaged leaders of the Transformation Team at HSBC to help the team build on a year of change and success to prepare for breakthrough performance by clearly defining their team’s “why”. The team’s work as a whole added incredible value to the organization and they sought to be inspired, aligned and engaged in understanding how the team as a whole created impact for their customers. Through our human in residence program, interactive workshops, interviews, spot-surveys and a team-wide leadership conference,  we helped the team build their story of change by identifying and articulating their “why”, defining what winning looks like and feels like, the “hows” of their strategy and creating sightlines to their specific activities and initiatives to create impact.

OUR WORK

Designing culture to get results.

We helped JEB uncover how embedding key culture drivers could boost their team’s performance to achieve great results.

JEB Group is an industry leader with strong values that are led and lived by leaders that believe in the power of human experience in their organization. The company has a powerful and positive culture that’s applauded by their partners along their value chain. In a bid to build alignment and strong performance across functions and regional locations, they engaged us to conduct a Culture Audit to determine what their people across the organization see, feel and believe about their current organizational culture, what inhibits greatness and what might fuel stronger engagement for long-term wins. Our findings highlighted opportunities where key drivers could be designed and operationalized in their culture to create a greater sense of belonging to the organization and to its performance.

OUR WORK

How purpose fuels competitive advantage.

We helped Steelcase discover how to activate a strong and enduring corporate purpose to fuel high performance.

Steelcase is a global company with purpose and innovation at its heart. The Asia Pacific organization has been focusing on building awareness and alignment of their purpose to boost their competitive advantage along their value chain and build long-term growth. We helped their leadership team in 7 regional markets connect to what purpose means for them and consider how it uniquely impacts their teams and business. We mapped where individuals and teams were on their purpose journey, what fuel existed in their organization to help propel them to reach ambitious goals, identified gaps that needed to be addressed, and recommended key areas to prioritize for their purpose to activate employees, customers and opportunities to amplify impact through partnerships.

OUR WORK

Social impact startup strategy supercharged.

Our strategy lab helped Equal Justice define their “why”, build the strategy and design the steps they needed to execute for impact.

We used our approach to help the seasoned leaders of Equal Justice design the strategy of their social impact venture. We guided them to explore why they exist, what winning looks like and feels like, the gaps and opportunities that exist, priorities for action—all the while focusing on the impact they want to create. We invited them to be bold with their ambitions to scale and then grounded them as actionable in time. We highlighted the power of storytelling and how uncommon partners can amplify impact. We encouraged them to harness their passion and expertise, start fast, have a bias to action, experiment, and bring in diverse people with varied ideas and experiences to help them build their society-changing venture.

We work with amazing clients

Our humans

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse varius enim in eros elementum tristique. Duis cursus, mi quis viverra ornare, eros dolor interdum nulla, ut commodo diam libero vitae erat. Aenean faucibus nibh et justo cursus id rutrum lorem imperdiet. Nunc ut sem vitae risus tristique posuere.

Lale Kesebi

Practice lead, Innovation

Yi Hoo

Practice lead, Innovation

Karen

Practice lead, Innovation

Bonnie

Practice lead, Innovation

Jesmine

Practice lead, Innovation

Oktay

Practice lead, Innovation

Sugjit

Practice lead, Innovation

Bonnie

Practice lead, Innovation

Our humans

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse varius enim in eros elementum tristique. Duis cursus, mi quis viverra ornare, eros dolor interdum nulla, ut commodo diam libero vitae erat. Aenean faucibus nibh et justo cursus id rutrum lorem imperdiet. Nunc ut sem vitae risus tristique posuere.

Lale Kesebi

CEO + Co-founder

Yi Hoo

Practice lead, Innovation