How Valimail Embedded Growth into its Culture and Increased eNPS by 23 Points

TL;DR: Discover how Valimail turned career development into a retention engine without headcount increases or top-down mandates. By rolling out Lattice Grow, creating values-aligned development guides, and empowering managers to lead with clarity, Valimail increased employee engagement, improved eNPS by 23 points, and kept voluntary attrition 86% below industry benchmarks — all while deepening trust across its fully remote workforce.

At Valimail, trust isn’t just a product — it’s a people strategy.

Valimail exists to protect trust in email, in systems, and in people. As a cybersecurity company specializing in email authentication, Valimail prevents spoofing and phishing before messages even reach an inbox. It’s a quiet kind of power: invisible to most, critical to all. The same could be said for how Valimail approaches employee growth.

With a fully remote team of just over 100 employees supporting thousands of customers globally, Valimail runs lean by design. Its workforce is made up of “ready-now” talent, seasoned professionals brought in to deliver results from day one. It’s a high bar, and the company knows it. But with limited vertical movement available, a question emerged: How do you retain high-performing talent when promotion isn’t always on the table?

Lelaina Vogel, People Operations Manager at Valimail, posed the answer as a principle: “We needed to make development a constant, not a reward. Growth had to be part of the culture, whether someone was stepping into a new title or simply deepening their craft.”

What followed was a sweeping — and deeply human — shift in how the company supported employee growth. A strategic shift that would improve engagement, supercharge recognition, drive voluntary retention numbers 86% above industry standards, and win the team Lattice's 2025 Retainer Award. 

A New Philosophy for Performance

Valimail’s first move wasn’t tactical, it was philosophical. The company redefined performance itself, not just as outcomes, but as evolution.

“We talk a lot about performance being 50% what we do and 50% how we do it,” Vogel said. “Yes, we care about business results. But we care just as much about how people grow while getting there.”

With that as a foundation, Valimail launched Lattice Grow across the company in Q4 FY25. The goal wasn’t adoption for adoption’s sake, it was about sparking real career conversations. Every employee was encouraged to complete a Career Vision and create at least one active growth area. No OKRs, no mandates. Just a culture-wide nudge: let’s get serious about your future.

By the end of the quarter, 25% of employees had done exactly that. By Q1, Grow engagement increased to 30% without any formal incentive. People were opting in because it felt personal. It felt real.

Building the Infrastructure for Intentional Growth

As adoption picked up, the People team at Valimail got to work building out the infrastructure to support it. They designed a “Career Development Menu” to give employees tangible ways to explore and pursue growth — whether that meant taking on a stretch project, building a new skill, or strengthening a core competency.

Alongside it, they rolled out a Values-Based Behavior Level Guide. This is a “job-agnostic” rubric that outlined what success looked like at each level of the organization, not in terms of business outcomes, but in how employees lived Valimail’s core values.

“We didn’t want a system that only worked for certain departments,” said Vogel. “This is a framework that scales across roles — engineering, sales, customer success — because it’s rooted in behaviors and values, not job descriptions.”

With this new layer of clarity, employees were no longer left to guess what growth looked like. And by anchoring development in culture, not just competencies, Valimail made growth personal, transparent, and fair. Helping employees see that they could evolve without needing to change teams or titles.

And managers were equipped with a shared language to talk about it.

Turning Managers Into Multipliers

While the frameworks were important, Valimail knew they couldn’t succeed without manager buy-in. “We realized we needed to make development visible even if promotions weren’t,” said Lelaina. “People needed to feel like their careers can evolve here and we needed managers to lead that effort.”

So the company trained people leaders to use Lattice Grow, which included how to tracking progress, co-creating development goals, and having the kinds of conversations that build long-term loyalty. And it worked.

“We gave managers the structure to lead with confidence,” Vogel explained. “They didn’t need to have all the answers, just the willingness to talk about growth openly.”

Within one quarter, the percentage of employees who reported having meaningful career development conversations with their manager jumped by 15 points. Career conversation satisfaction in engagement surveys hit 87%. And because the conversations were tracked in Grow, the People team could spot where things were going well and where to step in with support.

“It gave us visibility into manager-employee relationships in a way we never had before,” Vogel explained. “That let us lead with more care, more precision.”

A Culture of Recognition — Fueled by Lattice and Friendly Competition

With development now part of the company’s daily rhythm, the team turned its attention to recognition. Using Lattice’s feedback and praise feature, Valimail leaned into “Valiprops” – company wide shout outs that were submitted through Lattice and amplified in Slack. 

To build the muscle of regularly recognizing colleagues for a job well done, Valimail set up an internal competition to see which cross-functional pods could give the most shoutouts. 

What could’ve been a checkbox became a cultural cornerstone. Valiprops submissions increased by 95% YoY while maintaining quality, and employees began lifting each other up in real time — reinforcing values, celebrating progress, and reminding one another that growth didn’t go unnoticed.

“Especially in a remote environment, recognition matters more,” said Vogel. “It creates the connective tissue we need to stay aligned and energized.”

The Outcome: A Culture Where People Choose to Stay

Valimail’s investment in career development didn’t just improve engagement scores or tick HR boxes, it transformed how employees experience work. “People saw that we weren’t just talking about growth — we were building the systems to support it,” Vogel said. “And that created trust.”

Year over year, Valimail’s eNPS (employee net promoter score) surged by 23 points, employees reported an 87% approval rating for career development conversations, and peer recognition nearly doubled. Most telling of all, voluntary attrition remained 86% below industry benchmarks — proof that when people feel seen, supported, and aligned with their future, they stay.

But Vogel is quick to point out that none of this came from mandates or top-down pressure. “We didn’t force it,” she said. “Employees engaged because the framework made sense to them. It wasn’t about chasing a title, it was about having a conversation that mattered.”

That mindset — giving employees room to grow without requiring them to climb — is at the heart of Valimail’s success. Through clear frameworks, empowered managers, and a culture of recognition, the company created a system where development is not a destination, but an ongoing journey.

“Retention isn’t about locking people in,” Vogel said. “It’s about showing them that there’s something worth staying for and giving them the tools to get there.”

At Valimail, those tools aren’t just software. They’re trust, clarity, and a company-wide belief that every employee deserves to grow even when they’re exactly where they need to be.

In recognition of these efforts, Valimail was named the winner of Lattice’s 2025 Retainer Award which celebratescompanies that successfully build employee loyalty through strong, values-driven retention strategies.