Catalina Consultants has just been certified as a Great Place to Work for the third consecutive year, with 90% of our employees saying this is a great place to work, compared to 60% at a typical Australian company.

But the result we learned the most from wasn’t this year’s score. It was the year our results went backwards.

That’s because, instead of explaining it away, we decided to take a hard look at why and how we could fix it.

Here’s what we did, and what we think businesses of every size can take from our experience.

A flying start and then a dip… 

When we first went through the Great Place to Work certification process in 2024, we came out swinging. Overall scores were overwhelmingly positive across virtually every category.

It felt validating. We’d worked hard to build a collaborative and supportive culture and the survey suggested our people genuinely experienced it that way.

Which made year two more confronting.

Because, when we repeated the survey in 2025, our scores came back lower. Not dramatically – we were still certified and well above average – but still noticeably enough to give us pause. 

The easy thing would have been to explain them away, which is what a lot of businesses do with feedback they don’t want to hear. 

When scores dip, managers often scramble to work out why. Then someone points out that the sample size was small or that it was a tough period or that the questions weren’t quite right – and that becomes the narrative that everyone begins to adopt. 

Before you know it, the results get filed away and nothing changes.

The more courageous – and ultimately more beneficial – path is to take on the feedback people have taken the time to give you.

That’s why we decided to put last year’s result under the microscope and see how we could turn it into a positive for our people and our business.

What we actually did with the 2025 results

Rather than look at the results at a high level, we went deep, examining the areas where we’d scored lower in granular detail. Then we convened a focus group.

A small team went through the results item by item and identified around 22 distinct actions they thought would turn things around. And, most importantly, over the next year we put them all into play before taking the survey again.

The result was that our score moved back into the 90s once again.

Two things that made the biggest difference

While there may have been 22 recommendations all up, we noticed most of the changes fundamentally  came down to addressing two key things within the business. 

1. Rethinking flexibility

Since COVID, flexibility has become one of the most important issues to many workers, with surveys revealing as many as three-quarters of employees want to work away from their office some or all of the time.

Our workplace was no different, and the 2025 questionnaire surveys showed there was a strong preference among many of our people for an arrangement that allowed for two-days-from-home, three-days-in-office arrangement – the same model that had become common across many professional services firms.

But when we took that request to the focus group, a more nuanced picture emerged. For an HR consulting firm, working from a client site is central to the job. Two days away from the office didn’t just mean two days at home, it also often meant two days’ less availability to our clients. 

And that was fundamentally in tension with our commitment to providing clients with the very best service available.

So instead of simply adopting a blanket remote work policy, we asked a different question: what does flexibility actually mean to people here?

When we analysed it, we found the answer was that flexibility meant different things to different people. For some, flexibility meant location. For others, it meant control over start and finish times, school pickup arrangements, appointments, or having greater autonomy over how work fit into life. 

We also found that some level of flexibility was already partly built into how we worked. 

Catalina employees have a core commitment of 38 hours a week, but how and when those hours are worked has significant latitude.

We’ve long offered flexible start and finish times (from 7:30am through to a 6pm finish) plus a weekly flex arrangement that allowed people to build up hours and take a shorter day at some stage during the week. 

But the main issue was that people didn’t feel comfortable taking advantage of it. So, what we added was visibility, creating a dedicated Teams channel where people actively communicated how they were flexing their hours.

This normalised the use of flexibility that was already available, rather than leaving it to individuals to figure out on their own.

And, as a result, our flexibility scores went up significantly.

2. Explaining the money

The second major change was about financial transparency – specifically, helping people within the business understand its incentive structure.

Catalina has had a bonus and KPI plan in place for several years and the mechanics of it aren’t complicated. But in practice, not many people were hitting it. 

When we got into the detail, however, we found that this wasn’t because the targets were unreachable, it was because the connection between individual effort and business outcome hadn’t been made clear.

So we took the time to provide education to all employees around how we make money as a business. This led into how each person’s contribution fitted into the overall picture. It then became relatively straightforward to see how you could earn a bonus, and why you would work towards one – if that’s what motivated you.

This prompted a significant shift in the way people worked. In the following period, the number of people who reached their KPIs and achieved a bonus went up by more than 300%. 

Other team members were honest that they preferred to focus on their work without tracking against commercial targets, and that was fine too. But the people who wanted to engage with it found they now could, and that it made sense both to where the business was headed and their own career goals.

Beyond the incentive plan, we also worked hard to provide the team with more visibility into what the business spends money on and why, including training budgets, offsite programs, wellbeing initiatives. Understanding that these were conscious investments rather than unexplained expenditures made a difference to how people felt about the organisation’s priorities.

What your business can learn from our experience 

The reality is that, while earning recognition might make you feel great, the true value  of any engagement survey – whether it’s Great Place to Work, something you’ve designed internally or something that you ask us to provide – is almost entirely determined by what you do with it afterwards.

In other words, never take a survey if you’re not prepared to accept the feedback within it. If you’re just after a sticker or a stamp to put on your website, don’t bother. The whole point is to hear what your people actually think.

And, if you do score well, that’s valuable too. Understanding your strengths is invaluable when it comes to things like recruitment, retention, and branding. It gives you something verifiable to say about what your business is known for, and what your people actually experience working there.

The other dimension, which is increasingly important in 2026, is psychosocial safety. Workplace psychological safety obligations have become considerably more onerous in recent years. A good engagement survey provides one of the most direct, evidence-based ways to verify that your people feel safe and supported at work. So, in that sense, it’s like doing due diligence on your workplace practices.

Should your business get certified?

Just as it was two years ago, the short answer is yes – so long as clear eyes about what you’re signing up for.

Certification through Great Place to Work provides an externally validated benchmark. It carries weight with candidates, clients and the broader market in ways that self-reported culture claims simply don’t. And it gives you a consistent measurement tool that allows you to track genuine progress over time, including when things go backwards.

If you’d like something more tailored to your business, our outsourced HR team can design and run an engagement survey process that fits your size, industry and goals. 

But always remember that undertaking a survey or gaining certification is only the start. The businesses that get the most from it are the ones that treat any results as information to act on.

That’s what we did here at Catalina. Twenty-two actions, one focus group, and a 300% increase in people hitting their KPIs… 

The results didn’t just speak for themselves, they gave us something worth saying. 

Want more?

Interested in running an engagement survey for your business or exploring what Great Place to Work certification could mean for your organisation? Talk to the Catalina team today.

You can also read our original article on how we first became Great Place to Work certified, or visit the Great Place to Work website for more on the certification process.