Fast-growing online community builder empowers all employees with coaching and mentoring.
Founded in 2005, Reddit is a community of communities where people can dive into anything through experiences built around their interests, hobbies, and passions. From pets to parenting, skincare to stocks, there’s a community for everybody on Reddit and with more than 50 million daily active uniques and 100,000+ active communities, it is home to the most open and authentic conversations on the internet.
Making Reddit home for everyone in the world starts by ensuring that employees can find a home at the company first. As Reddit’s workforce continues to grow, a key focus has been to maintain and bolster its unique company culture to ensure that employees feel empowered and excited to come to work every day. This includes continuously adapting and evolving workforce philosophies, programs, and processes to make Reddit’s work experience better and to support emerging new leaders who fuel company growth and embody Reddit’s values.
Transforming programs and restructuring support as headcount increases can present challenges, especially when a company’s workforce is quickly growing. The pandemic created an extra challenge as Reddit adapted to implement its Learning and Development (L&D) programs across a remote work environment with the personalized approach it saw as critical to developing great leaders.
Key Highlights
- Inclusive learning and development program gives all employees at Reddit access to coaching and mentoring on a
single software platform - Emerging leaders are better equipped to support fast growth while reinforcing Reddit’s unique values-based culture
- Data-driven approach shows higher employee retention, performance, and promotion rates among program participants
How would Reddit quickly develop more leaders while maintaining a culture focused on community, belonging, and empowerment?
Reddit L&D creates a scalable coaching program with a comprehensive measurement strategy
Reddit’s L&D team, led by Tramel Dodd, began searching for an
answer to that question. Dodd’s goal has been to create a learning culture at Reddit that gives employees the autonomy to invest their time in the development opportunities of their choice. Offering high-touch leadership development opportunities such as coaching and mentoring to a much broader range of employees—not just to senior leaders—was key to helping each individual achieve their highest possible performance and to bolster new career passions or interests. It was important to find a solution that could scale to support fast-growing teams, align with Reddit’s mission, and provide the analytics needed to measure value.
Reddit chose to partner with Torch for three primary reasons. First, Torch offered a variety of formats like 1:1 coaching, group coaching, and internal/external mentoring so more employees could participate. Second, the Torch platform was flexible, allowing them to integrate the development needs of their organization into the platform. Finally, Torch provided the reporting and analytics they needed to help measure program ROI.
Reddit has partnered with Torch on a variety of their development programs, including:
Reddit sees meaningful gains in retention, promotion, and performance rates
By partnering with Torch, Reddit is able to more clearly demonstrate the value of these new programs. The analysis, which uses deidentified data, shows the programs’ significant impact on retention, promotion, and performance rates.
