The 2021 Best Firms to Work For: Prophet

Client Industries Served: Automotive, Aerospace, B2B, Consumer Goods, DTC, Education, Energy/Utilities, Entertainment, Financial Services, Food & Beverage, Healthcare, Industrial Products, Nonprofit, Retail, Technology/Telecom, Travel/Hospitality

Consulting Service Lines: Strategy

CMAG: How would you say you've managed to stay among the industry's Best Large Firms to Work For amid these unprecedented times?

At Prophet, we have always challenged ourselves to drive excellence for our clients while building a strong values-driven firm that provides development, growth, and advancement for all our teammates. We are always helping our clients unlock new ways to grow and transform, and we bring that same energy to the firm. As the crisis hit, we leaned into this strong foundation, dialing up a sense of empathy, caring, creativity and community, as we adapted to market conditions during Covid. We found it more crucial than ever to focus on the needs of our employees, taking the time to understand and prioritize mental well-being and connection as Propheteers worked from home around the globe.

We took a page from our own book on how we serve clients – remaining open and agile to new ways of doing things – as we experimented with ways to connect and collaborate with each other and our clients. As leaders, we needed to simultaneously attend to the health and safety of our employees and our clients and inspire our teams to keep moving the work forward. We were fortunate in that we had already been on a multi-year investment journey to build the kinds of digitally powered growth capabilities that were even more essential as clients needed to rapidly adjust to the crisis. By focusing on our culture, teams and relationships, we were able to better support not only our own teams but also our clients with strategies that will continue to help them bounce back and become more resilient for any future disruptions.

CMAG: Were there any specific programs or initiatives (internal or external) that contributed to you being a Best Large Firm to Work For?

Over the past few years, Prophet has accelerated our own transformation agenda. We've systematically deepened our expertise with talented and experienced experts in customer-centric, digitally-powered transformation – which helped us better position ourselves as a truly indispensable ally to leaders across the C-Suite. As we see our reputation change in the market, we are picking up challenging, multi-year transformation projects that truly touch every part of our clients' businesses. This is exactly the kind of cutting-edge, business-shaping work that energizes Propheteers around the globe. This year we've also put more investment behind Prophet's diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Our firm has been active in our pursuit of allyship and conducted an audit of our systems and process as an input into prioritizing key areas of opportunity to focus on for this year and beyond. To assist our firm in moving our DEI initiatives forward, we hired our marvelous Global Director of DEI, Amber Haggins, who has helped the firm drive forward its DEI efforts and continue to create a more inclusive and impactful experience for Prophet employees and clients.

CMAG: What is unique about your firm? What sets it apart?

Prophet's values and culture make it a standout firm. Propheteers are strategic, creative, kind, innovative, fearlessly human and authentic. Everyone is expected to think freely, push ideas and imagine possibilities. It is truly inspiring to see a breadth of Propheteers from novice interns to seasoned executives work together to create transformative work for our clients. We also do this with a spirit of community, built around a shared purpose, committed to teamwork, learning and growth. This push for authenticity and a human-led approach has allowed us to truly step into our clients' shoes from day one, drive impact and become an indispensable part of their transformative growth journeys. We build relevance–the kind that can only come from genuine purpose and empathy.

That means we stand for companies that stand for something–and we're here to co-create these ambitious avenues of opportunity alongside our clients and their distributed teams. Prophet does all of this powered by a very diverse set of capabilities and people, that aren't found typically under one roof. We have strong growth consultants and business builders, who work with service designers or product planners, who work alongside strong creative teams and storytellers, who might be working alongside insights, organizational design or data specialists. But rather than navigating across silos to get access to all of this talent, inside of Prophet, with our global P&L and strong integrated culture, all of these players are ready to work in bespoke, agile and highly effective processes from day 1 to create something powerful with our clients.

CMAG: What's the top priority over the next 6 to 12 months?

All of our regions are focused on efforts designed to enhance our work-life sustainability and create boundaries for employees working from home or deciding to return to the office. A dedicated Return to Work team has been in place since the start of COVID and they continue to work tirelessly to ensure our employees are set up with safe office spaces. We're asking our leaders to be more engaged and thoughtful about our working norms and supporting boundaries in their teams. We also continue to encourage all Propheteers to communicate what they need to do their best work and authentically maintain balance.

As mentioned previously, DEI is and will continue to be a priority within our firm as we strive to create a more inclusive and impactful experience for Prophet employees and clients. We are also gearing up for our annual Prophet Impact Day when the entire firm commits to acts of service to support our communities. This day is only part of our larger Social Impact program that includes efforts to be a more sustainable firm. We recently launched a sustainability audit with an outside partner, South Pole, to understand the areas where Prophet can do better when it comes to environmental management and performance. We also expanded the scope and scale of the firm's global pro-bono consulting program with more dedicated delivery teams doing good work with non-profits around the world.

CMAG: When you look at the remainder of this year and 2022, what excites you? What opportunities do you see in your markets?

Keeping up with the accelerated pace of growth that we have been experiencing over the past 18 months is more than exciting. There is so much investment being targeted to meet the urgent needs that many communities and sectors are seeing. We see an opportunity to be transformational change leaders as businesses rebuild and evolve in a post-Covid environment. We are excited that our more agile, more innovative, more digital and more human-centered approach to transformative growth is resonating so strongly in our markets. There are several opportunities in the markets, but we've been helping our clients focus on a few key growth areas: designing customer-centered transformation agendas, refreshing organizational purpose, investing in corporate culture, sharpening their brand strategy, accelerating digital transformation and adapting to a forever-changed customer experience.

CMAG: What impact do you think being a Best Large Firm to Work For has on the firm? Employees? Clients?

We are thrilled for the recognition and any opportunity to celebrate the tremendous work of our Propheteers. In terms of culture, Propheteers know what we have built is special, and this external recognition only reaffirms what we hope our employees feel every day. Our clients also feel the power of our people and this award is a wonderful acknowledgment that we're doing it right. We look forward to continuing our transformative, impactful work with clients and building on the learnings coming out of the pandemic on our own growth journey as a company.