Case
Study

TikTok - SocialMedia Platform

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TikTok is a global brand with incredible aspirations and huge targets. It has offices all over the world, including LosAngeles, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Mumbai, Singapore, Jakarta,Seoul, and Tokyo. In 2020, PUSH was recruited to work specifically with 700+people in the UK & EMEA teams, supporting their company culture, personal development and wellbeing.

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In early 2020, at a time when most companies were desperately trying to avert decline and focus on a survival strategy, TikTok exploded onto the UK media landscape. So much so, they had to grow their entire workforce by a factor of ten in a matter of months.

Exciting times but growth of this nature, especially in a pandemic, presents a host of challenges. With the team growing at an unprecedented pace, 90% of their people had never actually met each other, and everyone would be working from home for the foreseeable future.

TikTok UK’s Marketing MD Trevor Johnson, understood that whilst expectations were high for his team, the foundations and context were never more uncertain. He therefore needed to provide more support to help the team achieve its goals.

The main focus of the programme was to:

●      Help support the team throughout the current context (Covid-19) – considering WFH, huge growth, recruitment, on-boarding and more.

●      Create a team culture where the Tik Tok Team could genuinely thrive - even when they weren’t together

●      Build a team who are at peak performance so that they can weather and prepare for the future - even under the most unique circumstances

To kick off the programme, PUSH ran a team wide audit. The insights from it helped us understand what the impact of working from home had been on the team and helped us shape the programme that we would deliver.

We then developed the brand identity “Thrive xTikTok”, creating all of the marketing assets to be used. This included launch videos from Founder Cate and a ‘Mental Health Awareness Week’ campaign with specific content to support how the team were feeling alongside emails and weekly newsletters and ongoing programme content calendars and collateral - allowing the team to join the sessions directly from these documents.

The ‘Mental Health Awareness Week’ programme featured four workshops from PUSH coaches on managing change, nutrition to boost immunity, working from home for parents, and stress management. These were bolstered by additional bitesize wellbeing content created by the wonderful PUSH coaches on breath work, sleep and nutrition.

The activity then continued until September with:

●      Weekly meditation workshops and guided meditations to teach the team about the benefits of meditation while having the opportunity to practice in a guided setting.

●      8 personal development and wellbeing workshops using blended content such as podcasts, worksheets, short videos and live workshops. These sessions covered self care, building trust & rapport, stress management, working from home, growth mindset, building relationship sand empowering relationships..

●      1:1 nutrition coaching sessions to help the team with their diet, especially during a time when some eating routines were being affected..

●      Weekly exercise sessions including yoga, pilates and tai chi.

After three months, the programme was deemed a huge success internally from the feedback given after every session and brilliant attendance figures.

“I am so grateful for the team's support.”

“This session shows how vital it is for any company to organize regular sessions around mental health and wellbeing to keep us working at our best.”

This was one of the most useful sessions I've had at TikTok. It was insightful and to the point. Highly recommended to all!!!

Due to the success of the first phase of the programme, PUSH were asked to extend the programme beyond the UK marketing team to the entire EMEA region workforce. This would grow the programme from supporting under 100 people in the UK team to over 700+ across the region!Interestingly, we also now had to work with two stakeholders: the origina

l marketing team leads (who were paying for the programme) and the organisational culture team (who wanted the programme to fit into their EMEA-wide planning).It was a challenge that we happily rose to!

For this phase of the programme we were briefed to deliver two major pillars within the activity:

Community: Create serendipitous moments for the team to come together in a non=work-setting, even when they are working remotely..

Academy: Provide sessions where the team can learn and develop both personally and professionally with skills specific to this time.

And, finally, we needed to deliver the content across different formats to combat the team feeling ‘zoomed-out’.

Our October - December 2020 programme is currently still running, and includes:

●      Academy Sessions: ‘Reframing ChallengingSituations’; ‘Building Healthy Habits’; ‘Developing Inclusive Cultures’; ‘TeamCommunication’; ‘The Power of Trust’.

●      Community Sessions: ‘CreativeWriting’;‘Learning to Journal’; ‘Spoken Word Poetry’; ‘Nutritious Cook-a-Long’

The engagement numbers for this programme have been incredibly high, with a whopping 70% of the team joining at least one session so far:

Unique attendees across the programme - 565

Total attendees - 1376

Session recording views/listens - 729

The verbatim feedback captured after every session has been overwhelmingly positive across the programme and shows the success of these sessions. Comments from attendees mentioned how much they enjoyed the sessions and how grateful they are to have access to these workshops and talks.

“More presentations like this one to challenge the way we think and act.”

“Engaging and very interactive, friendly, welcoming - easy to share and try new things. Enjoyed the creative part but also seeing/getting to know other people from the company.”

“One of the most interesting sessions I’ve been to, and very relevant to me. Some good practical tips that Icould use right away as well.”

“Great host, lots of small manageable ideas, great bite sized reminder of what we know and should be doing.”

Across 24 sessions from May - December the average breakdown of scores was:

The coach was engaging and knowledgeable of the subject matter. 4.9/5

The coach explained and illustrated the concepts clearly and concisely. 4.9/5

The session content was organised and easy to follow throughout. 4.7/5

The session was engaging, with opportunities to ask questions. 4.6/5

“PUSH has been a perfect wellbeing partner for TikTok as we have grown at pace throughout these unique times.

Launching our programme with a team audit to fully understand the challenges that our people we’re facing, the PUSH Team tailored a programme of incredibly valuable and spot-on content to up-skill our people and support them throughout the pandemic and working remotely.

They helped us create an identity for the programme which felt completely TikTok whilst being real masters in engaging the team with their inspiring content; attendance figures were some of the highest that we’ve seen across our training programmes.

More than anything, they’re just brilliant people to work with -nothing is ever too much trouble and we have a lot of fun along the way!”

- TrevorJohnson, Head of Marketing GBS & Europe TikTok

Client Contact:

Trevor Johnson, Head of Marketing GBS &Europe TikTok

trevor.johnson@tiktok.com

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