How to build an award-winning culture?

How FunnelFuel Built an Award-Winning Culture Programme, And How You Can Too

By Liv Martin & Harriette Davison, FunnelFuel Culture Committee Co-Founders

An Introduction to FunnelFuel

FunnelFuel won two UK Company Culture Awards in 2026.

• Best Employee-Led Initiative
• Culture Team of the Year

These aren’t just awards that sit on a shelf. They’re a reflection of every conversation, every initiative, every team member who put their hand up to be part of something bigger.

“We developed FunnelFuel’s culture programme with the single vision of contributing to making the business a truly great place to work. Winning these awards means so much to us and to our wider committee — it’s a meaningful recognition of everyone’s hard work and dedication. We’re incredibly proud of the culture we’ve created together and even prouder to see it continue to grow and thrive.“

Liv Martin & Harriette Davison, Culture Committee Co-Founders

“Over the past few years, every single team member who’s joined FunnelFuel has brought something special to the company. Company culture is the mix of shared values, everyday behaviours, working styles, environment and rituals that shape how we operate together. Words cannot explain the pride I feel in our team right now. What an amazing achievement — and I can wholeheartedly say that this is completely down to them.”

Dan Shaw, CEO, FunnelFuel

So, How Can You Build An Award Winning Culture

We get asked a lot: “How did you actually build this?” So, we’re going to share exactly that, a practical, honest guide to launching a culture programme within your own organisation. No fluff, no tick-boxes. Just what worked (and what didn’t).

1. Find Your Culture Champion

The most important ingredient isn’t a budget or a framework, it’s a person (or two) who genuinely cares. Not someone doing it because it’s in their job description. Someone who loses sleep over how connected their colleagues feel, who gets excited about awareness months and inclusive socials, and who won’t let it become a box-ticking exercise.

Equally important: culture should not be defined solely by leadership. You need diverse contribution across all teams, seniority levels, and individual backgrounds. The richest ideas come from the most unexpected places. When people see themselves reflected in the culture programme, they engage with it. However, your leadership needs to support and recognise this, to ensure your champions are set up for success.

2. Find a Budget — Even a Small One

Culture doesn’t require a massive investment, but it does need some resource behind it. The first step is making the business case. We created a full proposal and presented it directly to our CEO and CFO. Their response? “The easiest yes we’ve ever given.”

Start with what you have. Even a modest pot of money, allocated thoughtfully, can go a long way. Prioritise the areas of highest impact first, and build from there.

If you can’t get a budget, there are still quick wins you can do that cost nothing to help start your culture journey

3. Pick Your Workstreams

After open consultation with the entire company, we landed on six core workstreams that gave us the best framework for structured, meaningful change:

• DE&I (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion)
• Wellbeing
• Social
• Philanthropy
• Perks
• Recognition

These were chosen because they offered a blend of quick wins and longer-term cultural shifts. You don’t need to tackle everything at once, in fact, it’s probably best you don’t. Focus where the gap is biggest first.

4. Run a Culture Workshop

Before you design a single initiative, listen. A culture workshop is one of the most valuable things you can do. It gives you direct insight into what your people actually need, care about, and want to see — and it removes the dangerous habit of assuming you already know the answer.

When people feel heard from the start, they’re far more likely to engage with what comes next.

Here are a few examples of the types of questions we covered with employees:

• What does company culture mean to you?
• What can we do better?
• What values do you care about most?
• What behaviours and norms should we encourage?
• Brainstorm actional solutions for known business challenges e.g. improving communication, including remote workers etc.

5. Build an Employee-Led Committee

This was perhaps our most intentional decision: the Culture Committee would not be led by senior leadership. Our leadership team endorsed it fully and provided buy-in at every stage, but they stepped back to let it be genuinely employee-led. Here’s how we structured it:

• Volunteer-only membership — people engage far more when they’ve chosen to be there
• Weekly meetings to maintain momentum and accountability
• Committee rotation every six months — we tried quarterly but found three months wasn’t long enough for members to get up to speed, make a real impact, and hand over meaningfully
• Real ownership — committee members manage their own budget, design initiatives, and build culture strategy

6. Your First Year: Try, Test & Learn

Give yourself permission to get things wrong. Not everything will land, and that’s completely okay. In our first year, we launched a wide variety of initiatives and learned an enormous amount about what resonated and what didn’t.

Our second year is more focused: fewer initiatives, but with deeper impact and higher quality execution. The learning curve of year one is what makes year two so much stronger.

Cost-Effective Quick Wins You Can Launch Right Now

To help you get started, here are some of our favourite initiatives across three key workstreams — all of which are low-cost and high-impact

Philanthropy

• Charity of the Year: Start by inviting employees to suggest a charity and share why it matters to them (optional). All suggestions go to a shortlist, which every employee votes on — making the process democratic and ensuring the whole team gets behind the chosen cause.
• The Great FunnelFuel Bake Off: A quarterly baking competition open to all staff, with anonymous judging and a minimum £2 donation to our Charity of the Year to taste the entries. Branded prizes included. Now one of our most anticipated events.
• World Cup Sweepstake: Simple, free to organise (plenty of templates online), and a brilliant excuse for a bit of friendly competition across the office.

Wellbeing

• Monthly Wellbeing Themes: Each month we focus on a theme — Mental Health Awareness, Sleeptember, financial wellbeing, and so on. We share relevant resources, signpost available benefits, and point people towards help if they need it. Low effort, meaningful impact.
• Wellbeing Sessions: We partnered with Rewind Your Mind for a deep relaxation session — giving the team a genuine opportunity to step away from their screens, reduce stress, and reset.
• Mental Health Training for Managers: Equipping your line managers to have better conversations is one of the highest-leverage investments you can make for your culture.
• Run Club: Completely free to run and one of the best things we’ve done for employee wellbeing. The FF Run Club meets regularly and has grown into a proper community. As a treat, we entered our members in the Battersea 10km — and every single one of them got a personal best. If you want to take it a step further, a local race entry is a brilliant (and affordable) reward for your runners.

DE&I (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion)

• Neurodiversity Training for Leaders & Line Managers: Understanding how different brains work is fundamental to creating a truly inclusive environment.
• Monthly Cultural One-Pagers: We create short, accessible guides on religious holidays, cultural awareness days, and events that matter to our employees. It’s a simple way to say: we see you, and your culture matters here.
• Office Celebrations: We decorate and bring in culturally relevant food and snacks to celebrate key moments together — Holi, Eid, Shavuot, and many more. It costs very little and means a great deal.

Recognition

• #Shoutouts Channel: Create a dedicated channel in Slack (or whatever internal comms tool you use) where employees can tag colleagues and celebrate great work. It doesn’t have to be a big deal — turning around a client deadline at pace, covering for a teammate, or even just baking a banana bread for the office. These small moments of public recognition build a culture where people feel genuinely seen.
• Quarterly Awards: We run four awards each quarter — Most Shoutouts, Above & Beyond, Ultimate Team Player, and The All Star Award. Winners are announced during our company-wide rundowns. Each winner receives a handwritten card from our Global MD and a gift voucher. It’s personal, it’s meaningful, and it costs very little.
• Employee Milestones: We have a #special-day Slack channel where the team celebrates work anniversaries and birthdays together. Both are also featured in our monthly employee newsletter. It takes minutes to set up and means a lot to the people being recognised.

Social

• Low-Cost, High-Fun Socials: Great socials don’t need a big budget — they need good energy and a bit of thought. We focus on inclusive events that genuinely bring people together rather than expensive evenings that only a portion of the team enjoy.
• Thursday Drinks Fridge & Games: We invested in a drinks fridge stocked with beverages from 4pm every Thursday. We also bought ping pong, beer pong, card games and board games for the team to unwind. It’s become a weekly ritual that people genuinely look forward to — and the ROI on a fridge is unbeatable.
• Rounders or Sports Day: Equipment is cheap to buy, and your local park is free. We head out in the summer for a rounders match or full sports day afternoon — always checking local council rules first. It’s brilliant for team spirit, gets people away from screens, and creates memories that last well beyond the working week.

Perks

• Make My Day: One of our absolute favourites. Random acts of kindness — designed purely to put a smile on someone’s face. Each month we do a desk drop: lunch vouchers, coffee vouchers, wellbeing boxes, chocolates, and more. There’s no agenda, no performance link. Just a reminder that the business is thinking about you.
• Book Club: Free to run if employees buy their own books, but a wonderful way to bring people together around something other than work. We run a monthly spinner to pick a winner from the book club — that person gets the next month’s book paid for. Simple, inclusive, and surprisingly popular.

The Bottom Line

Culture is most powerful when it is shaped by the people who live it every day. If you’re thinking about launching a culture programme in your organisation, our single biggest piece of advice is this: start with the people, not the process.

Find those who care, give them a platform, and get out of the way. The results will speak for themselves — ours just happened to come with two trophies.

There are so many more ideas we could share — but why not start there? Take one thing from this list, try it this month, and see what happens. Culture isn’t built overnight. It’s built one small, genuine moment at a time.

Want to follow our journey or find out more about what we do at FunnelFuel? Connect with us:

Follow FunnelFuel on LinkedIn and Instagram, or visit funnelfuel.io to find out more.

About the Authors

Liv Martin

VP of Customer Success & Culture Committee Co-Founder, FunnelFuel

Liv Martin is VP of Customer Success globally at FunnelFuel, with a deep and longstanding passion for workplace culture. Her journey as a culture advocate began at Thomsons Online Benefits (now Marsh Digital), where she was part of the Culture Committee and co-founded the company’s employee volunteering programme — an experience that lit a fire she’s never stopped tending.

She went on to launch and chair a Philanthropic Committee at Board Intelligence, further cementing her belief that culture, when done well, transforms not just organisations but the people within them. When she joined FunnelFuel, it was only natural that she’d bring that experience to bear — co-founding the Culture Committee alongside Harriette Davison with one clear mission: to make FunnelFuel an even better place to work.

Liv is a continuous voice for employee-led change and a firm believer that culture isn’t a perk or a policy — it’s the environment that enables people to do the best work of their lives.

Connect with Liv on LinkedIn

Harriette Davison

Culture Committee Co-Founder, FunnelFuel

Harriette is a Marketing Services Executive at FunnelFuel — only her second role in her career, and her very first experience building a culture programme from the ground up. What she’s achieved in that context is nothing short of remarkable. Rather than waiting until she had years of experience behind her, Harriette hit the ground flying: co-founding the Culture Committee alongside Liv, helping to shape its strategy, and bringing a level of creative energy and fresh thinking that has been central to the programme’s success. It is her creative talents — from the way initiatives are designed and communicated, to the details that make culture feel alive rather than corporate — that give FunnelFuel’s programme its distinctive character. Harriette is proof that you don’t need decades of experience to make a real impact; you just need passion, creativity, and the courage to go for it.

Connect with Harriette on LinkedIn