Customer Spotlight: Sandi Hildreth, Wieden+Kennedy

Wieden+Kennedy has been testing the boundaries of what a workplace can look like since Dan Wieden and David Kennedy founded the agency in 1982. Now the world's largest remaining independent advertising agency, with eight offices across four continents, W+K has built a reputation for creative culture as carefully as it has built its client work.

Sandi Hildreth has been at W+K for nearly 30 years, starting in Finance before moving to HR, and she now serves as Global Chief People Officer. Her career spans every dimension of the people function: employee relations, learning and development, corporate training, culture and change management, and global people strategy across offices that each have their own distinct identity within a shared set of values.

Her conversation with AllVoices covers what culture-first HR actually looks like when it is working, how she builds trust across a global organization, and what she sees coming in the future of work.

Sandi Hildreth on people strategy at Wieden+Kennedy

Hildreth spoke with AllVoices about the culture at W+K, how she maintains a global people strategy across eight distinct offices, and what HR leaders in every industry can take from the W+K approach.

Tell us about Wieden+Kennedy and your role there

W+K is the world's largest remaining independent advertising agency, with offices in Portland, New York, Amsterdam, London, Tokyo, Delhi, São Paulo, and Shanghai, and over 1500 employees. I've been at W+K for almost 26 years, being hired after university. I'm based in our Portland headquarters. I worked in our Finance department for over 10 years and then in Human Resources for the past 15 years. I've worn many hats in HR, including Director of HR for the Portland office. For the past 6 ½ years I've been in this global role overseeing people and culture strategy for all eight offices.

Hildreth's Finance background is part of what makes her people strategy credible. She understands the numbers side of the business as well as the culture side, which means her investment cases for programs land differently than those from HR leaders who have stayed exclusively on the people track.

What inspired you to pursue a career in HR?

To be honest, I kind of fell into it. I'd been in our Finance department for 10 years and was starting to get the itch to make a career change when the new HR Director asked me to move to the HR department to run payroll and benefits. That was my gateway into the world of HR and I've never looked back. I really love this work and believe my personality traits of being action oriented, dependable, and pragmatic have helped me succeed.

This is one of the more honest career origin stories in HR. Most of the best people operations leaders are not people who planned on HR from day one. They are people who discovered that the intersection of business performance and human experience is where they are most effective, and then built expertise from there.

Why is company culture important, and how would you describe W+K's culture?

Company culture is the most important thing any company can focus on, and I think is one of the biggest differentiators for employees on where they choose to work. Culture is extremely important for W+K. Dan once said "We've got to create a culture that is so damn weird, so wild, so sticky that it will hurt your very soul to leave." So we have focused on building, nourishing and protecting it. W+K's company culture is based on a foundation of values set at the outset by Dan Wieden and David Kennedy — creativity, independence, diversity, and a lack of corporateness. These values are the foundation for what makes W+K's culture what it is, but as the company has evolved and changed, the culture does too, based on what is currently important to our employees and the external world at large. We like to say each of our offices is a mixture of our W+K values, the city/country the office is located in, and the people that make up leadership. This ensures that whenever you walk into any W+K office it feels like one, but also feels different. And that is by design.

The framing of culture as something you "build, nourish, and protect" is the right one. Culture is not a document. It is a living system that requires ongoing maintenance, deliberate investment, and leaders who take it seriously enough to guard it when external pressures push toward conformity.

What are some unique ways you maintain a positive culture at W+K?

We focus on promoting and supporting creativity, diversity, inclusion, independence, and innovation in order to create an environment for employees to make the best work of their lives. This is our north star from an HR standpoint. We like to say we are at our best when we are in the eye of the cultural storm. Therefore, it's important to expose our employees to many different perspectives in order to see and experience the world differently. We've done that through an emphasis on diversity, inclusion and creativity, which comes inside our walls in various ways; through speakers, learning and development programs, mentor programs, and race and gender workshops, just to name a few. Beyond programs and culture, in order to support our employees to do their best work, we work hard to provide peace of mind and meet differing needs in their personal lives by providing excellent health benefits, generous family leave, sabbaticals, and in several of our offices onsite doctors, dentists, massage therapy, acupuncture, workout facilities, and even manicures.

The sabbatical point is worth noting. W+K has had sabbaticals for over 25 years. In an era where most companies are still debating whether to offer them, W+K built a long-tenure culture in part by taking long-term employee wellbeing seriously before the market required it.

How do you build trust with employees across eight global offices?

I feel incredibly fortunate that part of my job is to spend quality time in all eight offices. Being a frequent visitor and a recognized face, creating strong relationships with office leadership and my heads of HR, as well as connecting with (and understanding) as many employees as I can has helped me gain trust. For me, trust comes down to two things: actively listening to best understand how to help, and then following through. Talk without action doesn't move anything forward or build trust.

Active listening followed by visible follow-through is the formula for ER credibility at every scale. The same principle that Hildreth applies across eight global offices applies to a manager with a team of eight. Getting honest feedback from direct reports requires first proving that the feedback will lead somewhere.

How has the HR industry evolved during your time at W+K?

Absolutely! Fairly or unfairly, the role of human resources in every industry has typically been perceived as paper pushing law enforcement, not focused on people. There are some really awful examples of bad HR out there. W+K has always had a people first focus and that is a massive differentiator. As an independent company, we've been able to think big, be nimble, and create programs and policies that were ahead of trend — because it just seemed like the right thing for our employees. For example, we've had sabbaticals for over 25 years. We've had lactation rooms for over twenty years. We've had generous infertility benefits and family leave for all employees for more than 15 years. When you factor in current social movements and cultural revolution happening in the world, it's critical for human resources to make sure they know what is affecting their employees, both in and outside of work, and what the company can do to support them.

The "paper pushing law enforcement" framing is the perception problem that holds back HR effectiveness across almost every industry. HR teams that have earned strategic credibility did it by consistently being ahead of what employees needed before those needs became crises. That track record is what earns influence at the leadership table.

What trends do you see coming in the future of work?

Our company's workforce is 75% millennial, and Gen Z is about to enter the workforce — this plays a huge part in how I think about the future of work. I am very excited about future work trends, such as how to build succession and leadership development plans for a generation of employees that aren't interested in lifetime loyalty to only one company; how to truly build a diverse and inclusive workforce that puts representation at all levels at the forefront; creating workplace flexibility programs, to name a few.

These predictions, made before the pandemic, have all proven accurate. Gen Z entered the workforce with exactly the expectations Hildreth anticipated, and the HR teams that prepared for it fared better than those that did not. Strengthening the relationship between HR and managers is the infrastructure that makes flexibility programs and succession planning actually work in practice.

What has been one of your biggest career challenges?

The stigma that HR faces is probably one of the toughest challenges. How I, and my HR teams, overcome it is to just plain prove it wrong. I've always thought of this role as resources for humans and how we can build the best work environment for them. Another challenge I periodically face is impatience when my vision doesn't (or can't) always play out overnight. Being independent, W+K moves pretty fast when it comes to innovation for employees, but sometimes I just want to move even faster!

The framing of "resources for humans" is a useful reframe for any HR leader dealing with the credibility gap. It reorients the conversation from policy enforcement to problem-solving for the people doing the actual work of the organization.

What advice do you have for HR leaders trying to build healthier workplaces?

Know your employees/workforce and what is important to them, both through using data and analytics and connecting with them personally. Hire people who are better than you, give them every opportunity to shine, and celebrate their expertise as often as humanly possible. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are critical to the future success of every industry. If you haven't started doing this work, start by educating yourself. Get outside your comfort zone. Forge relationships, take seminars, read books, listen to podcasts, and partner with diversity organizations in your community and/or industry. But most importantly, be human. It's literally in the title of our jobs.

The closing line is the one that cuts through. HR is not compliance infrastructure. It is the organizational function responsible for making sure humans can do their best work. Build psychological safety as the foundation, and the rest of the people strategy has ground to stand on.

Where Sandi Hildreth's predictions stand in 2025 and 2026

This interview was published in early 2020, just before COVID-19 changed every assumption about where and how work happens. Several of Hildreth's predictions proved accurate.

Remote and flexible work became the baseline expectation

Hildreth anticipated the move toward workplace flexibility and virtual team management before the pandemic forced it at scale. What she described as an emerging trend in 2020 became a non-negotiable expectation for most knowledge workers by 2022. Companies that had already built the culture infrastructure to support flexibility adapted better than those that had to build it under pressure.

By 2025, hybrid work has settled into the standard model for most professional services and technology employers. The challenge has shifted from whether to offer flexibility to how to maintain culture, equity, and development opportunity when teams are distributed.

The representation priority at all levels remains unfinished work

Hildreth named representation at all levels as a core priority before it became the central DEI conversation of 2020. Five years later, the representation gap at senior leadership levels remains. According to Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace, employee engagement fell to its lowest level since 2020. The organizations maintaining genuine inclusion work are showing measurable retention advantages. The work Hildreth described as essential in 2020 is still essential. See how AllVoices helps HR teams build the infrastructure that makes inclusion work at the operational level.