The Culture On Wants to Carry Into Its Next Stage of Growth

I  DEEP DIVE INSIDER PROFILES 

Chief People Officer Katarina Berg is shaping the systems around a fast-growing global team while keeping the behaviours that built On visible in everyday work. When Katarina Berg joined On as Chief People Officer in August 2025, she did not arrive looking for a culture to redesign.

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After 12 years at Spotify, where she had helped navigate the company from its earlier startup years into a global organisation, Berg knew how tempting it could be for a new people leader to arrive with a familiar playbook. Her approach at On was deliberately different.

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“My first priority wasn't to change On; it was to understand what already made it exceptional,” she says. Her first months were spent talking with people across the company, from founders and athletes to store teams and leaders in different markets. That starting point matters because On already had a strong idea of the company it wanted to be. Its culture grew alongside the business rather than being designed later by a people function. The behaviours that became On’s “Spirits” were eventually written down around five years after the company started, once the founders realised they needed a way for those behaviours to travel beyond the people who had been there at the beginning.

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Today, Berg’s broader goal is to make that culture useful at a very different scale. On now has more than 4,500 teammates around the world, and the informal ways a smaller company shares context cannot carry the same weight forever. Her focus has been on making it easier for people to understand where they can act and what the company expects from them as it grows.

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For Berg, that does not mean surrounding people with more process. She talks instead about creating clearer ownership and stronger operating rhythms so that decisions can happen closer to the work. “Culture scales through clarity, not complexity,” she says.

That principle is beginning to show up in some very tangible ways.

In 2026, On changed its global onboarding model and introduced Ignition Days. Every quarter, new teammates from around the world are brought to Zurich for three days at On Labs, where they meet founders and senior leaders and learn how different parts of the business connect. The point is not simply to explain policies before somebody starts their job. It is to give people the bigger picture early enough that they understand the organisation they are joining and where their own work sits inside it. In early feedback, 93% of participants said the experience gave them a clear picture of who On is as a team and where the company is heading.

That emphasis on context runs through the company’s approach to leadership too. On has developed its School of Leaders around the idea that leadership is something people practise rather than something that begins at a particular level of seniority. Participants choose development based on what they need rather than being placed into a rigid programme according to title, reflecting a wider belief that people should have meaningful autonomy over how they grow.

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It is an approach that fits with one of Berg’s longstanding views of culture: leaders should create the conditions for good judgement rather than attempt to control every decision. At a company growing as quickly as On, that distinction becomes important. More people inevitably requires more coordination, but adding layers every time the organisation becomes more complicated can eventually remove the entrepreneurial behaviour that made the company successful in the first place.

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On’s culture is unusually physical too, which makes sense for a company whose mission centres on movement.

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The Zurich workspace has been designed with internal “trails” that encourage people to move through different parts of the building and encounter teams they might not otherwise work alongside. The company also deliberately creates informal gathering areas alongside quieter spaces for concentrated work. Movement is treated as part of the working environment rather than something that begins after the working day ends.

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Development follows a similarly practical approach. Employees have access to individual learning budgets, while internal programmes are built around people taking an active role in deciding what they need to learn next. On also uses regular feedback and its annual engagement survey to understand where the employee experience is holding up and where the organisation needs to adjust as workloads and complexity increase.

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There are signs that people still feel connected as the company gets larger. On reports that 85% of employees say they can be their authentic selves at work, while the same proportion say they feel part of a team. Those numbers matter most in the context of a workforce now spread across offices, stores and markets around the world.

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The harder part will be maintaining that experience through the next stage of growth.

Berg is not approaching that as an exercise in preserving an old version of On indefinitely. Her view is that relevant cultures have to evolve with the company. What matters is being precise about which behaviours continue to help people do great work and then designing the organisation so those behaviours remain possible.

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That makes the next chapter of On’s culture less about adding more cultural language and more about what happens in ordinary moments: whether a new employee understands the business quickly enough to contribute, whether someone knows when they can make a decision themselves, whether a leader gives a team enough context to move, and whether people can still challenge the established way of doing something as the organisation becomes more sophisticated.

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For Berg, that is the work of scaling culture. The ambition is not to make thousands of people behave in exactly the same way. It is to give them enough shared understanding that they can keep building On together, even as the company they are building becomes much bigger.