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.

Several decades ago, work/life balance referred to mothers who were trying to balance parenting with a career. Seems so archaic now, right? Then we progressed to work/life balance, meaning separation. You went to work, you came home, and – at least in theory – the two were distinct. Balance simply meant you got to leave the office on time, stayed away on weekends and had the opportunity to switch off.

For many employees, that version of work/life balance no longer exists. And for many employees, they like it this way – working from home, getting the washing done and a dip at the beach at lunchtime – but at what cost?

In 2026, work is no longer tied to a single location or a fixed set of hours. Instead, it moves across devices, environments and time zones. This means the challenge many organisations face is no longer how to separate work from life, but how to stop work from expanding to fill almost every part of it, albeit in a “flexible” way.

That, in turn, raises a more useful question: not whether employees have work/life balance, but whether the way work is structured today is actually sustainable. In other words, can employees have their cake and eat it too?

Balance is now about control, not hours

Work/life balance is no longer simply about working fewer hours. For many employees, balance means having the opportunity to structure work around real-world responsibilities – whether that’s school drop-offs, caring responsibilities, lifestyle choices, commuting constraints, or simply aligning work with periods of higher focus and energy.

Gallup research consistently shows hybrid work remains the dominant employee preference, with greater control over time cited as the primary reason for this. But the same data contains a harder finding: even among hybrid workers, employee engagement has fallen to a ten-year low, and clarity about what’s expected at work is now the lowest it has ever been. Sometimes working more flexibly actually adds to the stress!

And that points to the real issue in 2026. Having flexibility over where you work is not the same as having a workload you can actually manage. And flexibility can actually exacerbate your workload if too many variables are at play.

Flexibility without clear expectations isn’t balance, it’s availability

This is where the post-pandemic promise of flexible work is starting to show its limits.

Many employees have gained real autonomy over their hours and location. But the work still needs to get done, and more and more employees are finding that with flexibility comes the challenge of encroachment.

When an employee doesn’t provide clear expectations around their availability, flexibility can shift from a benefit into an obligation, with the freedom to work from anywhere becoming, in practice, the expectation of being reachable everywhere.

Hybrid work arrangements don’t solve the availability problem, neither do wellness programs, or Friday afternoon finish times or any policy that treats balance as something employees achieve on their own if given enough flexibility. 

Instead, it needs something more direct: clear expectations around deliverables, communication around availability, and managers who model those expectations rather than blurring them.

A performance and retention issue

Search “work/life balance” online and most of what you’ll find still treats it as a wellbeing issue. But in 2026, organisations that still take this approach are misreading what the research actually shows.

Effective work/life policies today include clear guidelines around communicating an employee’s availability and how they are accessing flexibility, and manager training that builds the capability to have real conversations about workload and expectations within that flexible regime.

When this happens, it has been shown to lead to reduced turnover, with McKinsey finding that employees who were able to manage their personal and professional responsibilities reported significantly lower rates of burnout. 

And research published in Harvard Business Review made an even more surprising finding: that effective work/life support leads to higher quality leaders and more effective leadership decisions.

The role of managers in promoting work/life balance

The research is also clear about the fact that none of this happens automatically. McKinsey found that manager behaviour was one of the primary factors determining whether work/life arrangements actually worked in practice. 

This finding connects directly to the next problem most organisations haven’t solved: that not all employees experience work (or life) the same way.

On this front, Gallup identifies two roughly equal groups in the workforce. 

Employees are more engaged and productive when the way they work and the way they prefer to work are aligned.

Managers who are too rigid, who focus too heavily on rules over results, and who force employees into ways of working that remove the benefits of hybrid and flexible work (at least in the employees’ eyes), are likely to find their efforts at work/life balance reduce productivity and retention rather than improving it.

Which means the real capability question isn’t whether a flexibility policy exists. It’s whether the managers implementing it understand that a “blender” forced into fixed hours is just as disengaged as a “splitter” who’s never allowed to switch off.

A 5-point plan for building work/life balance into your workplace

So, if you want to build work/life balance into your workplace, how do you do it? Here’s our simple guide on where to start.

  1. Set expectations around flexibility in writing. If an employee has asked for a flexible work arrangement, ensure all parties understand what this means and work towards achieving it – and resist blurring the lines.
  2. Encourage the taking of leave. Parental leave, annual leave, carer’s leave – all need to be not just a legal entitlement but actually encouraged at every level. Policies that exist but feel risky to use deliver none of the retention or productivity benefits the research suggests.
  3. Train managers, not just policies. Awareness isn’t enough. Managers need the skills to have direct conversations about workload and capacity, to identify unsustainable “flexibility” patterns before someone burns out or leaves, and to model the same expectations they’re asking their teams to maintain.
  4. Design for difference. Recognise that splitters and blenders exist in roughly equal numbers across your workforce, and that life stage and personal circumstances shape what balance actually means for each person. Build enough flexibility into working arrangements that managers can respond to individuals rather than applying rules counter-productively.
  5. Measure outcomes, not availability. Review whether your performance culture is rewarding results or rewarding visibility. If the people who get ahead are consistently the ones who are always on, no flexibility policy will change the underlying dynamic. 

Help your people understand that “visibility” is not what is expected, it’s deliverables.

Want more?

If you’re looking to build a genuine work/life balance into your organisation, get in touch.

New legislation allowing employees access to 10 days of Paid Family and Domestic Violence Leave (FSVL) applies for large business from today, 1 February 2023. What does this mean for employers?

Firstly, what’s changed?

What is FDV?

Violent, threatening or other abusive behaviour by an employee’s close relative, a current or former intimate partner, or a member of their household, that:

Who is included?

When can it be accessed?

Full-time, part-time and casual employees may apply for FDVL if:

What evidence is required?

An employer can ask their employee for evidence that shows the employee took the leave to deal with family and domestic violence
If the employee doesn’t provide the requested evidence, they may not get FDVL
The evidence has to convince a reasonable person that the employee took the leave to deal with the impact of family and domestic violence

Types of evidence

What about Confidentiality?

New regulations prohibit employees from including information concerning FDVL on employees’ pay slips (Regulations)
This includes information about the employee taking FDVL, including leave records as well as any evidence provided by the employee
Payroll systems must be set up to ensure non-disclosure in leave records and on payslips
Pay slips must not mention FDVL, including any leave taken and leave balances

What are the obligations of an employer?

What should employers do now?

We recommend that all businesses take the following actions immediately:

We are here to help you with any of these changes. Reach out if we can offer you support.

Thinking of selling your business? Your Human Resources (HR) policies, processes and practices are all likely to have an impact on the price you receive. 

We explore what you need to do to get your business HR ready for sale so that you secure top dollar when it comes time to sell.  

1. Have the right HR policies in place

First and foremost, any potential buyer will usually want to know how your business functions from an HR perspective. Even more importantly, that your HR policies will continue to function when the buyer takes over. They’ll also want to know that you have established HR customs and procedures that don’t conflict too much with their own. 

This means always taking the time to document and write down your HR policies and procedures before your business goes to market. This means everything from employee leave and flexible working hours through to termination and redundancy.

2. Understand your HR liabilities

The other key concern most buyers will have is your HR liabilities. They’ll usually go through a due diligence process to uncover these (or at least their lawyers will). When they do, they’ll notice things like “golden parachutes” for managers, massive redundancy entitlements, large looming bonuses and, most importantly, excessive leave liabilities. 

To get the best price, you’ll need to keep these to a minimum. If a member of staff has accrued more than eight weeks’ annual leave, you may be within your rights to ask them to use some of it. You should also be prudent when it comes to agreeing on severance terms with senior staff.  

3. Do what you can to retain key staff

One of the most challenging things to do will be convincing your employees to stay on after the sale. Some buyers will stipulate as a condition of sale that your key employees stay. This is especially true of any businesses that rely specifically on the skill of the staff to make money (ie professional services), as well as for relationships-based businesses. 

Key employee retention is also important when the sale doesn’t involve a merger or acquisition by a similar business. That’s because the buyer won’t have existing employees to take over that workload.  

Losing key staff in the run-up to a sale is also likely to diminish your business’s value. Reassuring them about their value is obviously a start, but sometimes it takes offering them incentives for them to stay. You may find you need to offer loyalty bonuses in this regard.

4. Keep up employee morale

A buyer is able to see a workplace with poor employee morale or a toxic workplace culture. They will notice workers who are disengaged and productivity that is slipping. To get the best value of your sale, you need to prevent this from happening. That involves communication.

It’s only natural employees will be worried, and let’s face it, perhaps some staff have every right to be. But you also need to let employees know the positives that new owners will bring. Will there be increased opportunities? A new direction? The chance to play out on a bigger stage? Just be sure that you’re realistic about what the future brings as promising the world is likely to have the reverse effect.

Also, keep your door open and let people come to you with their fears. Staying open and honest is vital. 

5. Make sure you’re compliant

Finally, one of the main HR-related exposures any business buyer can face is inheriting non-compliance with a law, regulation, award or agreement. Here, it’s your responsibility to make sure the buyer won’t uncover any major surprises in their due diligence. 

The way to do that is to audit your HR policies and practices. You need to find out where your exposures lie. Then you can make them right and make an educated decision on how to best approach things. 

Uncovering a major breach of law can make a buyer nervous and leave them wondering what other exposures they may be facing. 

Are your HR policies ready for sale?

Selling a business can be a long and drawn-out process. Any serious buyer is going to take time going through every detail to make certain they know what they’re buying. By identifying and correcting any HR-related issues, you’ll be in a much stronger negotiating position and more likely to get the best price. 

If you’d like to get your business and HR policies ready for sale, speak to the Catalina Consultants team.

Companies that fall foul of the new whistleblower laws risk seriously heavy fines. So what should your business and your HR department be doing to comply? Employers who fall on the wrong side of these new whistleblower policies, risk the prospect of being fined up to 10 per cent of their annual turnover. This new whistleblower protection regime came into effect on 1 July 2019.

Which whistleblower protections have changed?

The key changes introduced on 1 July, that affect your HR policies are set out below.

The federal government introduced the changes by amending the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) and the Taxation Administration Act 1953 (Cth). Together, these Acts regulate almost all companies, including foreign corporations, trading or financial corporations formed within the limits of the Commonwealth, ADIs, NOHCs, super funds, and insurers.

What penalties apply if your business breaches the new whistleblower laws?

Courts can make orders against a company if they fail in their duty of care to protect a whistleblowing employee. The maximum civil penalties for breaching the confidentiality of an eligible whistleblower’s identity or causing or threatening harm include:

Three actions your company needs to do to comply with the new whistleblower laws

To make sure your company stays on the right side of these laws, we believe there are three things your business should be doing.

Implementing a whistleblower policy

From 1 January 2020, some companies will be required to have a whistleblower policy that complies with the new section 1317AI of the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) or face a $12,600 fine. This can be drawn up by your Human Resources department.

This includes:

To comply with section 1317AI, the policy must contain:

What if you don’t fall under these rules?

Although only certain companies are required to have a whistleblower policy, we strongly recommend all companies create or update their whistleblower policy. We also recommend that your policy includes a scope to conduct investigations internally and externally, and addresses client legal privilege. Your policies should also set out a cohesive process to work through situations where a person subject to disclosure is also authorised to receive it. Finally, as part of these new policies and procedures, we suggest you have a process for determining whether eligible whistleblower consent to be identified during an investigation.

And for listed companies?

ASX-listed companies should also take account of the ASX Corporate Governance Principles and Recommendations, which further recommends that policies:

Assessing your current whistleblower procedures

The new regime requires employers and HR departments to analyse and strategise any existing whistleblower procedures they have in place and to rework or replace them where necessary. Further, to protect whistleblowers from harm, ensure any whistleblowers’ information is stored securely in confidentiality and that what you’re doing complies with privacy laws.

Training all your staff in whistleblowing protections

Given these significant changes, we recommend employers provide two types of tailored HR training. The first training program should be for ‘eligible recipients’. This is eligible to members part of the sector such as senior managers, officers, and anyone else authorised to receive disclosures from whistleblowers, including compliance officers. This training should cover the process set out in the company’s whistleblower policy to respond to disclosures. Pay special attention to the importance of protecting the whistleblower’s right to anonymity during the investigation, unless they consent to being identified. Remember you auditors, actuaries, tax agents and BAS agents are also ‘eligible recipients’. Although it isn’t expected fo you to train these people, we recommend you inform them of their new obligations.

The second training program should be for all staff, including all Human Resource employees. This should set out how the whistleblower regime works and how your whistleblower policy provides a process for disclosing and investigating certain matters. It should also be used to provide details of the protections that will be provided to eligible whistleblowers.

What do you need to do right now?

Employers should respond to the new whistleblower regime now to make sure they comply with new laws and that they’re not exposed to the potential of exceptionally high fines. After all, a fine of 10% of annual turnover is high enough to cripple most companies. Don’t have HR issues, have HR solutions. If you’d like to know more about your own company’s circumstances, introducing these policies into your organisation or what practical steps you can take, get in touch.