Compass Health serves over 12,000 people a year across five counties in northwest Washington. Their 32 sites range from urban clinics in Everett to rural outposts in Whatcom County to a location on San Juan Island that you can only reach by ferry.
When they decided it was time to build a shared culture across all of it, the logistics alone were daunting. But the bigger challenge wasn't geography. It was trust.
Compass Health had values. Most organizations do. But when leadership sat down to understand how those values were actually experienced across the agency, the picture was more complicated than anyone expected.
Some employees loved working there and felt deeply connected to the mission and their teams. Others said the culture felt absent, or worse, negative. Both groups were describing the same organization.
"We didn't have a company culture. We had a site-by-site, program-by-program culture."
— Missy Judd, Chief of StaffThe clarifying moment came during an internal planning committee meeting. As the conversation got real about culture, the tension in the room exposed two very different perspectives: some felt the culture was being unfairly criticized, others felt that no amount of conversation was going to lead to real change. That divide was exactly the problem. CEO Tom Sebastian and Chief of Staff Missy Judd looked at each other and knew the gap was wider than they’d thought, and it needed a real solution.
Compass Health considered building a culture program internally. Clinical Director Brooklynn Horat, who was asked to lead the initiative, shut that down quickly: "This is a full-time job, and I already have one of those."
What they needed was something proven — a framework that had worked in mission-driven, people-centered organizations doing hard, complex work. The reference that moved the needle came from a VA partner who had implemented CultureWise and described it simply as "the single most important thing we did" for their culture.
Brooklynn formed what became the GRACCE committee — named after Compass Health's values acronym — a cross-agency group of staff who represented the voice of the whole organization, not just the executive suite. They were the ones who ultimately chose CultureWise. The decision wasn't top-down. That mattered.
The rollout week tells you everything you need to know about how seriously Compass Health took this.
Ten sessions. Five days. Seven in person, three virtual for teams on islands and running 24/7 medical services who simply couldn't travel. And at every single one of those sessions — morning and afternoon, driving hours between locations, staying overnight — CEO Tom Sebastian was there.
Tom has been with Compass for nearly 40 years. He started as a clinician. His presence in those rooms wasn't ceremonial. It carried weight that no external facilitator could manufacture.
"Our CEO attended every single session. It would be really hard to give this 100% if he had not shown up the way he did."
— Brooklynn Horat, Clinical DirectorThe decision to run all ten sessions in a single week was deliberate. Compass Health knew their people talked to each other. Word would spread — and they wanted it to. Each day, people who'd attended shared what happened with people who hadn't. Energy built. By the Friday virtual session, it was the best-attended and most engaged of the entire week.
As Tom’s Chief of Staff, Missy sat in on the first three sessions to observe how staff were receiving and engaging with the material. In one of them, an employee came in with arms crossed, announced she wasn’t sitting where she was told and wasn’t volunteering for anything. By the end of that session, she was raising her hand.
The fundamentals were barely a month old when the early signals started showing up. Staff were carrying their pocket cards everywhere — reordering them because they were wearing them out. The shared language was giving people a structure to raise difficult issues, not just celebrate good ones.
"People are using the Fundamentals to justify why they're raising something and why we should address it. We're not just seeing the positive side — we're seeing people use them to work through difficult conversations."
— Missy Judd, Chief of StaffThe most unexpected signal came from Tom Sebastian's weekly fundamentals communications. Rather than writing about work, he wrote about his marriage, his kids, his personal life. Colleagues who had worked alongside him for years said they learned things about him they'd never known. That vulnerability — from a CEO with nearly four decades at the organization — changed something.
"Taking the time to talk about the Fundamentals has brought more communication in the team and more vulnerability. We are able to learn from each other and grow and be better clinicians. It makes it more of an intentional conversation."
— Kristin Henderson, Care CoordinatorTeams that Brooklynn least expected to engage were forwarding emails about their huddles. Managers were hearing from their people in new ways. Chief Advancement Officer Tom Kozaczynski described what he was observing: "I feel like there's just a greater sense of energy than I've felt in some time. People feel energized and excited. And having this common playbook means people know — this is how we treat each other here."
For an organization serving Medicaid populations in some of the most under-resourced communities in Washington state — where pay can't always match commercial healthcare and culture has to carry part of the weight — that shift isn't just a feel-good story. It's a retention strategy. And it's working.
Compass Health's story isn't really about rolling out a culture program. It's about what happens when leadership decides that culture is too important to leave to chance — and then actually shows up for it.
The CEO attended every session. The initiative was led from the ground up, not handed down. The rollout was designed to build momentum, not just check a box. And the result was an organization that, weeks later, had people on remote islands and overnight medical teams using a shared language to connect with each other in ways they hadn't before.
Culture doesn't change because you announce it. It changes because the people with the most to lose — the leaders — make themselves visible and vulnerable enough to show that it's real.
Compass Health did that.
→ Read the full Compass Health case study to see how they built one culture across 32 sites.
CultureWise helps organizations build strong, behavior-driven cultures by design. Through a proven culture operating system of leadership training, tools, and daily practices, we help companies align teams, strengthen accountability, and turn culture into a competitive advantage.