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Marnie Gibson is a commercially astute HR/OD leader with over 15 years of experience in senior HR roles across industries such as professional services, FMCG, chemicals, mining, financial services, retail and local government, primarily in Australia and APAC. She has worked in both brownfield and greenfield environments, leading business growth and transformation. Marnie has expertise in ER, IR, performance, reward, talent, and learning and holds undergraduate, master's, and PhD degrees in HR and OD. She chairs the People and Culture Committee for Reclink Australia and lectures in HR at USQ, developing new courses to support future HR professionals.

As part of a previous consulting assignment, I was tasked with building a high-performance culture in the case study organisation with the aim of developing a highly engaged workforce that thrives on commercial delivery. The objectives were to build a culture with employees who:

● Understand and identify how their work contributes to revenue growth and improved EBIT;

● Prioritise productivity over activity, understanding their impact and the ROI of their work;

● Remove complexity in their work and focus only on work that contributes to strategic objectives;

● Identify how they need to work and who they need to work with to get the best outcomes;

● Engage, recognise, develop, and reward talent that works collaboratively to achieve these goals and grow with the business, inspiring others to follow.

I began the data collection phase for diagnosing the current status to design and articulate the transformation plan. In my investigation, I found that very little data existed from an HR perspective; an annual engagement score and standard safety metrics were the only data points in existence. I gathered these and then developed a range of HR reports to collate an overview, alongside sales and financial metrics. In analysing the data, the emerging result was what theorists would call a ‘polite’ or ‘nice’ organisational culture—one that was highly inclusive and caring, often referred to by employees as a ‘family.’ This culture was one of high creativity and moved at a fast pace, driving busyness and activity.

Other insights leading to this conclusion included a low feedback culture, a weak performance and development framework, a diverse employee demographic, and employees exhibiting low commercial acumen and low resilience. Leaders were not providing feedback or managing performance due to the perceived misalignment with the highly caring and inclusive culture. It was seen as "not nice" to provide tough feedback or performance-manage employees, so these actions and behaviours were not embedded strongly enough. Perpetuated by this immature feedback culture, employees were not resilient in managing feedback. Therefore, performance management efforts were unsuccessful and often disbanded. The annual performance process and KPIs were also vague and not measurable, reflecting subjective, motherhood statements and delivery aspirations.

Furthermore, while the ‘family’ perception of the organisation may assume positive relational connectivity, many studies have demonstrated the dangerous nature of this perception in a work environment for several reasons (Luna, 2021). One key reason is that, with families, it's personal. There is assumed acceptance; therefore, poor performance and behaviours of family members can be tolerated due to unconditional positive regard and an indefinite bond. The ‘family’ rhetoric further undermines the ability of the organisation leaders to manage performance and behaviour and to move employees on, as we don’t performance-manage our family members!

While organisations may celebrate having a highly creative culture, nuances and imbalances here can be detrimental. The act of creating new ideas and progressing something new is highly valued, which results in lots of different things being progressed all the time. When this occurs in a highly diverse environment devoid of feedback, it means that all ideas are valued equally and progressed regardless of strategic alignment and cost-benefit analysis. This is what produces the high pace of activity and busyness. In an environment where being ‘busy’ is an accolade and there are few metrics and low commercial acumen, then continuously creating and working on lots of different projects becomes important. This work might not deliver an impact against objectives; it is activity, not productivity, and not high performance either.

"An integrated, strategic, measurable approach is necessary to shift and transform organisational cultures to deliver greater performance and higher employee engagement, ultimately resulting in better commercial outcomes for any organisation."

There are several robust and interconnected constructs here, which are quite detailed. However, based on the above analysis, the culture transformation was distilled into these key shifts:

Current: From	Desired: To
Polite	Perform
Low feedback	High feedback
Activity	Productivity
Creativity	Innovation
Low commercial acumen	High commercial acumen

To enact these shifts, a strategic transformation plan was defined. This program included multiple HR initiatives to deliver on this outcome, including:

1. Review, redesign, and re-launch of the performance and development framework, including the alignment of all individual and departmental KPIs to commercial metrics.

2. Development of a total rewards framework, including an overhaul of the current remuneration and recognition approach.

3. Leadership development and people management capability uplift, focusing on feedback, performance management, accountability, and recognition.

4. Employee relations maturation.

5. Introduction of department- and organisation wide dashboards.

6. Business initiative to simplify all business processes.

All enveloped in a holistic communications plan, leveraging greater commercial transparency and ownership.

The new dashboards enabled progress to be measured and shared with the business during regular updates, which recognised delivery, created positive momentum, and provided opportunities for collaborative and transparent problem-solving. As transformation occurs on a continuum, the organisation is still evolving. However, some of the measurable impacts observed were:

● Improved business performance; highest revenue and EBIT post transformation in years

● Improved employee engagement scores

● Greater retention of key talent and more internal promotions

● Reduced contracted costs across the business

● Product and campaign rationalisation = cost savings

● Improved ER outcome metrics

Greater consolidation of business processes (reduction in number of processes)

As demonstrated here, an integrated, strategic, measurable approach is necessary to shift and transform organisation cultures to deliver greater performance and higher employee engagement, ultimately resulting in better commercial outcomes for any organisation.