It used to be seen as the part of a corporation that pushed paper and managed payroll issues. But in 2022, human resources is the key to culture, transformation and even a company’s vision.

In early 2020, Joanne Fox was just seven months into her role as executive general manager of People & Culture at AGL Energy when she stepped up to chair the company-wide pandemic working group. Shifting 75 per cent of the workforce – some 3000 employees – to working from home happened in a week, while the responsibility for managing the crisis on top of her day-to-day job continues. That the organisation has relied on the expertise of its people chief to navigate the unknowns of the past two years is indicative of a much wider change in the business environment.

Once a back-office administrative function, the old Personnel Department – responsible for what many organisations now call “hygiene” issues, such as pay and tallying up leave – has undergone a strategic revolution. Off the back of dire talent and skills shortages, rampant digital transformation and a global pandemic, human resources (now commonly “people and culture”) holds a pervasive and increasingly influential role in corporate success.

In fact, HR professionals have never been busier, says Sarah McCann-Bartlett, CEO of the Australian Human Resources Institute (AHRI). The institute’s research showed that HR’s influence within business in the early days of the pandemic rose by about 15 per cent – a figure that’s believed to be much higher today. “Over the past two years, HR professionals have really proven their value.”

This includes “stepping up to support employees’ increasing mental health and wellbeing needs”, says McCann-Bartlett. “They’re navigating skills shortages and keeping leaders on course, ensuring all organisational decisions are made through a people-first lens.”

In the wake of the pandemic, debates about the future of work, hybrid or even “radically remote” workforces are raging globally amid controversy over vaccination mandates (or not) and the “Great Resignation”, as people rethink their careers and life goals.

But even before this health emergency, the size of HR teams, their responsibilities and clout were on the rise with a sharpening focus on the employee experience and employee value propositions (aka EVPs), driven by the highly competitive job market and the fostering of cultures that motivate people to stay.

Technology and automation have long been taking on peoplecentric processes, from recruiting to onboarding of employees, freeing up HR professionals for higher order tasks such as workforce planning, leadership coaching and people management. The HR of today is data-based, analysing the information it collects and often applying AI to identify workplace and workforce trends and support strategic decisions and outcomes.

“All change involves people and therefore it should always involve HR,” insists McCann-Bartlett. While HR is now often on executive teams across corporate Australia, where chief HR officers (CHROs) are on the rise, their influence often stops at the boardroom. It’s an area where the institute says there’s room for improvement – not least because there’s evidence that CEOs wear rose-coloured glasses. AHRI research in 2019 revealed a gap in cultural perceptions and that the percentage of CEOs who believed their organisations would cut corners to improve financial outcomes was significantly lower than managers and employees closer to the corporate grassroots.

Of course, the HR team’s role is to influence executive decisions and deliver optimal people outcomes. But the curly question is whether HR represents employers’ or employees’ interests. Ultimately, it works for the good of the company, contends McCann-Bartlett. “Like finance or marketing, they’re adding value to the organisation as a whole. Yes, they sometimes have to answer to executive teams or the CEO but they have to make sure employees are treated fairly and with respect and evaluated through an ethical lens.”

Here are three organisations leading the way.

Epic recharge

Canva
Designing for fast growth

When Canva co-founders Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht pledged the “vast majority” of their $16.5-billion stake in the online design company to its charitable foundation, with the aim of eliminating extreme poverty, the “people” side of the business received an immeasurable boost. Simultaneously, in September 2021, the company announced its US$40 billion valuation, off the back of its massive growth in the previous year and a new funding round.

“We’ve always had a two-step plan,” says Jennie Rogerson, global head of people at Canva. “Step one: build the most valuable company in the world. And step two: do the most good.” Working for a company that’s making meaningful change is recognised as a powerful motivator for attracting and retaining talent, she acknowledges. “It matters when people are choosing to take on that next challenge.” For existing employees – or Canvanauts as they’re known – it provides a sense of purpose.

With more than 75 million monthly users across 190 countries, Canva is working on doubling its 2500-plus employees worldwide in the next year. It’s also putting a greater emphasis on peoplefocused activities, from pre-hiring and recruiting to onboarding and alumni and every touchpoint in between.

Founded in Perkins’ Perth living room in 2013, Canva is facing the challenge of maintaining its culture as it expands, explains Rogerson, who heads a team of 170. What was simple to communicate when you were six people around a table (or even 100 people on a floor in Sydney) takes on different, larger proportions. “You can start to feel removed as a company grows so we’re working on writing down all our philosophies.”

New recruits are matched with a buddy to show them the ropes for the first six months. And every employee has a coach “who makes sure they are facilitated with the right growth, goals and stretch goals so they feel constant challenge”.

The “Vibe team” within the people group is responsibles for culture, fostering moments like “the epic recharge” goodie boxes, which mark employees’ five-year anniversaries with the company. The team orchestrated Canva’s en masse remoteworking shift, while the wider global trend also drove the shift.

Rogerson sees an alignment. “We want to make sure our people experience is as delightful as our product experience.” Important in the growth surge is ensuring everyone feels they have a voice in how the company runs. Ideas feed through the people team, an ideas box or the optionally anonymised “fix it” form, through which Canvanauts flag what’s not working and suggest solutions. The form itself was born of one such suggestion.

For the people team, success comes from “consistently listening” through short surveys and a 60-question annual survey. What inspires or makes Canvanauts more comfortable on the job is very different in China, the United States and South America, Rogerson points out. A working group is tasked with actioning next steps and feeding back to survey respondents within seven days. Canva is one of the world’s fastest-growing software businesses but, says Rogerson, “we want people to know their opinion has been heard by a human and has a place on our roadmap”.

Change culture

Frasers Property
The “future of work” opportunity

The future of work is top of mind for organisations worldwide. Frasers Property, a residential, retail and commercial property management company, has partnered with the University of NSW Business School in a two-year research project studying current workforce preferences and how they’ll evolve. “We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape things and reimagine how, when and where people work,” says Ranna Alkadamani, general manager, People & Culture, at Frasers Property. “It’s critical for how we attract and retain people.”

The findings of the study will assist the company, which employs 650 people across Australia and 100 in its logistics, industrial and commercial business internationally, to build strategies for its future workforce and workplaces and also help its customers with design across a range of projects, from shopping centres to office and industrial spaces and residential communities.

HR must lead the workplace revolution and be adaptive, insists Alkadamani. “It’s too easy for people to revert to old habits. That would be a missed opportunity.” Leading the way on people issues isn’t new for Frasers Property, which has transformed its culture and is a high achiever in the gender equity stakes, with the number of women managers in the business leaping from 48.4 per cent in 2016 to 80 per cent last year.

“There was no burning platform to change culture,” says Alkadamani. “We weren’t under any financial pressure and people enjoyed working here but it was inconsistent. In our businesses we have CEOs who believe in people having a great experience at work and treating people with respect.”

The property group has focused on developing its leaders as custodians of culture “because what we have learnt is leaders have a massive impact on culture, far more than any other intervention”. Leadership development is not negotiable and involves extensive 360-degree feedback. All senior leaders are partnered with executive coaches.

Among the key lessons, says Alkadamani, is that culture is like fitness – you have to keep working on it or it’ll slip away. “You can have a cultural aspiration that’s shared globally or nationally but the experience of culture is local for an employee – it’s based on where you turn up – so you have to work hard on creating a consistently good culture in every part of the business. We came from a place where culture was good in some parts and not so good in others.”

When you work on culture, “people’s expectations change and increase. You never arrive. We’re proud of our good culture but we know how much effort has been put into it.”

Alkadamani, who joined Frasers in 2005 and now leads a team of 11, says that as the cultural transformation unfolded she was conscious of the cyclical nature of the property industry and its fluctuating markets. “You have to be deliberate to sustain a good culture in the property industry.” But the group, which measures its culture every two years with an extensive, externally run survey, found people in business units that had been through difficult periods in the market still charted well.

What’s more, results of the 2021 survey, in which 90 per cent of employees participated, showed that the company’s culture had been sustained – and, in some instances, improved – during the pandemic, despite a restructure, lockdowns, retail shutdowns, transferring everyone to working from home, limiting numbers on construction sites and curtailing the amount of business they could take on. “We were fortunate,” says Alkadamani. “It’s like we’d built a culture bank we could draw on.”

Empathy, resilience & kindness

Culture AMP
Winning people with technology

Launched in Melbourne in 2009 to facilitate anonymous employee surveys, Culture Amp may be at the epicentre of the business cultural revolution but, ironically, the company is far from immune from the game-changing forces impacting the employment landscape.

Although its mission is to change the world of work, Culture Amp is as much a part of the story as the more than 5000 clients it works for, concedes Katherine Rau, director of people operations at the company that officially hit unicorn status with a $2-billion valuation in mid-2021. With 750 employees working throughout Australia, the US, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, Culture Amp is grappling with the same challenges as every other organisation, says Rau, who’s watched the remit of HR teams grow exponentially.

Take staff wellbeing. “In the context of keeping our employees productive and happy to sustain high performance, it’s now an expectation that we’re looking after people. But try customising two people’s needs. For some it’s about having strong flexibility; for others it’s more about deep mental health support or helping with their physical pursuits, like gym, yoga or nutrition. How do you have myriad programs that talk to each of these?”

Culture Amp now has roles dedicated to increasing mental health support and, not surprisingly, leans on technology and tools to extend the capabilities of its 30-strong people team. “We’re looking at new platforms to help us scale virtually, to give employees access to trained professionals in areas like mental health and coaching, and with resources that are self-serve for different demographics, such as parents.”

Leaders also need skills they haven’t required before, says Rau. Empathy, resilience and kindness, for instance, were not traditionally seen as standard leadership competencies – and some leaders are adapting better than others.

On Culture Amp’s side is its Culture Lab, which has an abundance of aggregated data from survey results to analyse and identify trends.

The company is far from alone in having a higher attrition rate than it would like. From one million responses to exit surveys, it’s zoomed in on “regrettable” attrition numbers – those staff members who their employers don’t want to lose – to discover why people are leaving. Topping the list? Lack of investment in professional growth. Role enablement for remote teams and ways of working. Commitment to diversity and inclusion. “We can learn from our customers,” says Rau, “and we can use ourselves as a test-and-learn in different programs and to inform our products.”

With technology at its core, how does Culture Amp keep the human element alive for its staff? “People want to see humanity play out in leaders. They want to see vulnerability and transparency. You can do that virtually. Our CEO and executive team have really focused on shining through with those qualities and showing up on Slack, Zoom and various other platforms, making our people feel connected and important.”

How you communicate in person, in writing and across platforms remains the critical skill for today and tomorrow.