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 some of the most open and authentic conversations on the internet.
Making Reddit home for everyone in the world starts with ensuring that employees can find a home at the company first. As Reddit’s workforce grew, a key focus was to maintain and bolster its unique company culture so that employees felt empowered and excited to come to work every day. That meant continuously adapting workforce philosophies, programs, and processes — and supporting the emerging leaders who fuel company growth and embody Reddit’s values.
Transforming programs and restructuring support while headcount climbs is hard on its own. The pandemic added another challenge: delivering learning and development across a remote work environment without losing the personalized approach Reddit saw as critical to developing great leaders.
Key highlights
- An inclusive learning and development program gives all employees at Reddit access to coaching and mentoring on a single platform
- Emerging leaders are better equipped to support fast growth while reinforcing Reddit’s values-based culture
- A data-driven approach shows higher employee retention, performance, and promotion rates among program participants
A scalable coaching program with a real measurement strategy
How would Reddit quickly develop more leaders while maintaining a culture focused on community, belonging, and empowerment?
Reddit’s L&D team, led by Tramel Dodd, set out to answer that question. The goal: create a learning culture that gives employees the autonomy to invest their time in the development opportunities of their choice. Offering high-touch leadership development such as coaching and mentoring to a much broader range of employees — not just senior leaders — was key to helping each individual reach their highest possible performance and pursue new career passions.
The solution had to scale with fast-growing teams, align with Reddit’s mission, and provide the analytics needed to measure value.
Reddit chose to partner with Torch, the leadership coaching and alignment platform, for three primary reasons:
- Variety of formats. 1:1 coaching, group coaching, and internal and external mentoring meant more employees could participate in the format that fit them.
- A flexible platform. Reddit could integrate its own development needs and values into the programs it ran.
- Reporting and analytics. Program-level data gave the L&D team what they needed to measure ROI.
“Working with Torch coaching has been an invaluable experience. It provided me with a reflective space to objectively analyze problems and, with the guidance of my coach’s insightful questions, discover lasting solutions on my own. My coach played a crucial role in empowering me to become an effective problem-solver.”
— Talent Development Manager, Reddit
Meaningful gains in retention, promotion, and performance
By partnering with Torch, Reddit is able to clearly demonstrate the value of these programs. Analysis using deidentified platform data shows a significant impact on retention, promotion, and performance rates among participants compared to non-participants.
With coaching and mentoring available earlier in their careers, more Reddit employees benefit from high-touch professional development at the moment it matters — accelerating their growth, and Reddit’s.
Want to see how coaching tied to your company’s own leadership capacities works in practice? Explore more customer stories, see how Torch approaches leadership coaching, or learn why teams choose Torch.