Jerónimo Martins – Building a culture that drives growth

How we helped one of Europe’s largest retail groups, Jerónimo Martins, turn corporate values into a lived culture, and why the results prove that values done right are a commercial imperative.

The case for Values

Values and behaviours must be designed to drive business growth. They must shape a culture that makes the workplace a great place to work for employees and a great brand for customers to do business with. 

​Yet, most organisations treat values as a communications exercise. They commission a set of words, publish a poster, run a launch event, and declare the job done. However, the words fade. The culture doesn’t change. As a result, the business loses the one asset that no competitor can replicate: its people, at their best.

The Team believes differently. Values and behaviours are a strategic lever. When defined with rigour, embedded with intent, and measured over time, they shape how decisions are made, how leaders lead, and how employees show up for customers. They are not a soft investment. Instead, they are a commercial one.

Ultimately, values and behaviours change organisations when they shape the decisions people make every day. To achieve this, organisations embed them in performance, recognition, learning and leadership systems.

Jerónimo Martins understood this. And the results speak for themselves.

Our client

Jerónimo Martins is one of the most significant food retail groups in Europe and Latin America. Operating across Portugal, Poland and Colombia under brands including Biedronka, Pingo Doce, Ara and Hebe, the Group employs approximately 115,000 people. As a result, its workforce spans multiple languages, cultures, operating environments and levels of seniority.

115,000 employees across Portugal, Poland and Colombia

4 countries of operation, multiple brands and business functions

€26.5bn+ Group revenues in 2023, making cultural alignment a commercial priority¹

​With such scale comes complexity. Creating a genuinely shared culture across a workforce this large is not a communications challenge. Rather, it’s a strategic one. The same values must resonate with a logistics worker in Gdańsk, a store manager in Bogotá and a finance director in Lisbon. And they must feel relevant, not imposed. Inspiring, not corporate.

Consequently, the moment had come for Jerónimo Martins to move beyond inherited values that no longer reflected the organisation’s ambition or scale. In 2023, the Group set out to define a new cultural framework that could unite its global workforce and serve as a genuine guide for how the business grows.

The challenge

Jerónimo Martins brief to The Team was not simply to name a set of values. The ambition was to create “company-wide understanding” of a new values and behaviours framework so that it would be “well known across all brands, embraced, and demonstrated correctly by everyone across the business.”

That is a significantly higher bar than most organisations set. It required not just defining the values but designing the entire system by which they would come to life: the narrative, the identity, the activation tools, the communications rhythm, and the performance management integration.

​The specific challenges were threefold:

• Scale and diversity: reaching 115,000 people across three countries in a way that felt locally meaningful, not globally generic
• Depth over awareness: ensuring employees didn’t just know the values existed, but understood what they meant in practice – what different behaviour looks like at every level
• Sustainability: building not a launch, but a system that would continue to embed values long after the initial campaign concluded

Our approach

The Team’s methodology began with strategic definition. Working in structured sprints, we led a process of immersion, insight and narrative development before moving into creative concept and activation planning. This sequencing matters: values that are designed before they are understood become slogans. By contrast, values that emerge from genuine insight become culture.

To achieve this, Phase one involved deep stakeholder engagement: workshops with the Jerónimo Martins project team, interviews with leaders and employees across markets, and immersion in the organisation’s history, its commercial context and its people strategy. From this foundation, we developed a strategic narrative that framed the ‘why’ behind the new framework.

Next, the project moved into campaign concept and visual identity development. The identity needed to feel entirely synonymous with the Jerónimo Martins brand – not a sub-brand or a bolt-on – while evoking pride, pioneering spirit and belonging. It had to work across languages and markets, in digital and physical environments, from boardrooms to warehouses.

To achieve this, we remained in close dialogue with Jerónimo Martins HR directors, internal communications teams and senior sponsors, ensuring the emerging work was grounded in operational reality, not just strategic aspiration.

​The Idea: ‘What We Do Is Who We Are’

“What we do is who we are.”

The platform we developed for Jerónimo Martins was built on a simple but powerful insight: values are not beliefs held in private. They are made real through action. Every decision, every interaction, every response to a difficult situation is an expression of who an organisation truly is.

The line ‘What we do is who we are’ gave the framework clarity and accountability. It told employees that values are not aspirational statements about who we’d like to be. Rather, they are standards of behaviour for how we operate, right now, every day.

Through research and collaborative workshops with employee groups across markets, we distilled the framework into three core values:

• We raise the bar
• We count on each other
• We believe in doing the right thing

To bring these values to life, each was supported by clear behavioural statements – observable, specific descriptions of what each value looks like in practice at every level of the organisation. This is the critical step most values programmes skip. Without behavioural translation, values remain abstract. By contrast, with it, they become a practical guide for how to work.

​Embedding the Values at scale

Defining compelling values is the beginning, not the end. The organisations that see genuine culture change are those that treat embedding as a discipline in its own right. At The Team, our work with organisations including bp and NatWest Group has shown that values only change behaviour when organisations build them into the everyday architecture of work.

For Jerónimo Martins, we developed a phased communications and activation strategy designed to move employees through four distinct stages: inspire, educate, embed and sustain. The plan was built around:

• Pre-launch preparation: workshops with HR directors, internal communications leads and executive sponsors to align language, build advocacy and prepare leaders to be credible carriers of the new values
• Leadership launch: dedicated leadership events to equip the organisation’s most visible people to model the values before any broader rollout
• Global employee launch: a coordinated launch event bringing the values to all 115,000 employees simultaneously, with localised activation in each market
• Listening and engagement: online sessions to gather employee voice, identify advocates and shape ongoing communications
• A central digital hub: a dedicated resource hosting playbooks, stories, updates and guidance for managers and employees
• Sustained activation: newsletters, manager toolkits, recognition initiatives, onboarding integration and learning design to create a continuous ‘beating drum’ of values communications
• Performance management integration: connecting the values and behaviours framework to the organisation’s existing performance management processes so that values-based behaviour became a dimension of how every employee is assessed and developed

This last point deserves emphasis. Performance management integration is where most values programmes fail. Without it, values remain a parallel narrative. With it, they become part of the fundamental conversation between a manager and an employee about how they are performing and how they are growing. That is where culture is really made.

​The impact

Culture change is notoriously difficult to measure. The organisations that get it right establish clear baselines, define what change looks like in practice, and track it rigorously over time. Jerónimo Martins did exactly that.

As a result, a 2024 internal audit across the Group’s businesses found compelling evidence that the values and behaviours programme was achieving its goal: changing how people think, talk and make decisions at work.

More thoughtful with detailed examples cited in values-based performance conversations²

Deeper conversations reported on the ‘how’ of work, not just the ‘what’²

2× increase in employees rated 4 out of 5 on values-based performance – more than doubled²

​Indeed, these are not small shifts. In a workforce of 115,000 people, doubling the proportion of employees who are demonstrably living the values at a high level represents a significant change in organisational behaviour. It means that the values have moved from the poster on the wall to the conversation in the room.

The finding around ‘behaviour reflection’ is particularly significant. When employees measure success by both what they achieve and how they achieve it, they turn values into a practical guide for everyday work. That creates the foundation for a high-performance culture.

​“When values are embedded in performance management, they stop being principles and start being standards. The conversation shifts from ‘did you hit your targets?’ to ‘did you hit your targets in a way that makes this organisation stronger?’”

Why this matters: The business case for Culture

The evidence linking organisational culture to commercial performance is substantial. Companies in the top quartile for employee engagement outperform those in the bottom quartile by 21% on profitability, according to Gallup’s long-running research.³ Similarly, Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends research has consistently found that organisations with a strong, purposeful culture report higher levels of innovation, employee retention and customer satisfaction.⁴

For Jerónimo Martins, a business whose competitive advantage rests fundamentally on the quality of service delivered by 115,000 frontline employees, the connection between values, culture and commercial performance is not abstract. It is direct. Therefore, employees who feel connected to a shared set of values are more likely to stay, more likely to perform, and more likely to deliver the kind of customer experience that builds brand loyalty and drives revenue.

​Jerónimo Martins has publicly stated that people are central to its strategy. The Group’s sustainability and annual reports consistently identify employee engagement, development and wellbeing as priorities.⁵ As a result, the work The Team undertook gave those commitments the strategic infrastructure they needed to translate into behavioural reality.

Learning reinforced

Every values and culture programme The Team undertakes adds to a body of knowledge about what works and what doesn’t. For example, we have done similar projects for bp, NatWest Group, Azercell, AZCON, and Genius Sports, to name a few.

Consequently, the Jerónimo Martins project reinforced several principles that we regard as non-negotiable:

1. Values must emerge from truth, not aspiration. After all, the most effective values frameworks reflect what already sets an organisation apart. They amplify and give language to existing strengths.
2. Behavioural translation is everything. A value without a behaviour is a belief without a standard. Make every value tangible by defining the behaviours that bring it to life.
3. Embedding requires a system, not a campaign. A launch event creates awareness. And a performance management framework creates change.
4. Leadership is the medium through which values travel. The most important communications channel in any organisation is the manager-employee relationship. Leaders need the skills, support and commitment to model the values visibly.
5. Measurement creates accountability. Organisations that measure the impact of their values programmes take them more seriously. Likewise, so do their employees.

For Jerónimo Martins, the result is a cultural platform that is measurably changing the way employees work, the way managers lead, and the way the organisation thinks about its own performance. Ultimately, that is the ambition every values programme should set for itself.