Agencies are always competing to attract and maintain the best talent. We wanted a way to differentiate our agency by forging stronger, more productive relationships between our people while appealing to fresh talent seeking an interesting, diverse, forward-looking culture.

To do this, we employed our technical and psychological capabilities to initiate a program called myCOLOR to help our people better understand their personalities and how they can work best with people who have similar or different personalities.

As an internal initiative, we did not establish a formal budget, but looked to the efficiencies the program could deliver and the positive cultural impact it could have to justify the investment in time, money, and effort.

The scale of the program is agency-wide, affecting all 250+ members of our company — as well as impacting the world outside our walls, including prospective talent, through promotion on our social media channels.

With our target audience identified as current and prospective employees, we wanted to come up with a way to help our people work more effectively while promoting a culture based on a better understanding of ourselves and others.

To do this, we decided to establish a method of determining different personality types, identifying each by color. By assigning each of our people with “the color of their personality”, we could provide a catalyst for conversation and engagement — and a unifying theme for our efforts to build better teams.

We felt we could draw on our experience in developing marketing technology, as well as our expertise in consumer psychology, to create a personality quiz based on HEXACO, the latest and most scientifically valid personality model, the data-driven results of which could inform color-based visualizations that allow our people to “wear their colors on their sleeves”.

To bring our idea to life, we partnered with one of the world’s leading psychometricians to create a fun, 20-question personality quiz in the form of a web app called myCOLOR.

Users take the quiz and AI-powered software determines which of six colors (red, blue, black, yellow, purple or green) best represents their personalities.

To allow our people to display their colors, we worked with a local clothing designer to create agency-branded clothing, which we provided to all 250+ employees. Shirts came with enamel pins and jackets had Velcro patches in the six personality colors, allowing everyone to “wear their colors on their sleeves.”

We also commissioned wooden, color-coded plant holders for each person’s work area, while our design team created schematics that show how different colors can best work together. These were sent to all staff as PDFs and also serve as posters displayed throughout our agency.

The results of the myCOLOR program have been both rewarding and encouraging and continue to manifest themselves as the program evolves.

Thanks to myCOLOR, we are creating an atmosphere within our agency where people are using their understanding of how different personality types can work best together and are building stronger teams based on balancing the strengths and weaknesses of different personalities.

The program also serves to enhance our internal agency culture, providing an interesting topic for initiating conversation and interaction and unifying our people around the idea of celebrating diversity in personality type as well as other aspects of human differences.

We believe the myCOLOR program adds value to our agency’s brand not only in benefitting our employees (“the consumer”) through enhanced interactions within the agency, but also in projecting the program as a differentiating element of our culture through promotion on our social media channels.