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What if your company culture wasn’t just an HR buzzword but the secret weapon to scaling your business?
Welcome to Kan Talk Kulture, the podcast that dives deep into how remarkable company cultures are intentionally built and how they can transform your team, your business, and your bottom line.
Hosted by Kylie Anne Neal, founder of Kan Kulture and a passionate expert in people, culture, and leadership, this show is designed for business owners, CEOs, HR professionals, and anyone who believes that empowered people are the key to long-term success.
Each episode features real conversations with inspiring CEOs, business leaders, and culture champions who share how they’ve shaped their team environments alongside case studies, practical tips, and bold questions that challenge the status quo.
Whether you're looking to boost employee engagement, create a high-performance team, or align your people with your vision, this podcast will help you connect the dots between culture and growth.
At Kan Kulture, we believe in Kindness, Understanding, Learning, Trust, Uniqueness, Respect, and Evolving, and this podcast brings those values to life.
If you're ready to turn your team into your biggest brand ambassadors and create a workplace people love, this is the podcast for you.
Find out more at www.kankulture.com
Hi, I'm Kylie Anne Neal, founder of Kan Kulture and welcome to Kan Talk Kulture. In this podcast, I sit down with some of Australia's most progressive founders and CEOs to explore the heart of their company cultures. What drives them, what they value, and what it's really like to work for the companies they lead.
You'll also find occasional episodes packed with practical HR insights to help you build safer, stronger, and more trusted workplaces. So whether you're a new team maba, getting to know your workplace, curious about creating remarkable company cultures. Or just wanting to know more about implementing HR best practice.
You are in the right place. Let's dive in.
Hello and welcome to the Kan Talk Kulture podcast. I'm Kylie Neal, your host, and joining me today is Georgina Walker, who is a people and culture consultant with Kan Kulture. Welcome again Georgina.
Thanks for having me, Kylie.
Thank you for coming. It's a pleasure to have you in the studio again.
Thank you.
Love being here.
Now, something that we hear a lot is we are probably too small for hr and what normally sits underneath that comment is We'll get HR when we really need it. The reality is that. Most clients, um, come to us to begin with when there's a crisis, we base our model over that because that's the way that it has happened from the start is smaller organizations, they don't think I need to set up my people practices.
From day one, I'll get a HR professional in to help me. It's normally when, uh, there's. Something not going right. It might be a, uh, a performance concern that's, uh, distracting productivity. It might be, uh, policies that they don't have in place. It might be legislation that they've heard on the radio that they dunno whether they're compliant with.
They, there's a whole array of. Problems that happen in a business that create crisis that HR professionals are then called into resolve. We, when businesses get to that point, it creates a heaviness. It really stifles progress and inefficiencies within a business whilst a leader is distracted by dealing with a people problem that they don't.
Necessarily have the tools, processes, or understanding of how to resolve. So it's not a failure for businesses to work in that way. It's actually really, really common. But businesses can approach it quite differently.
Mm, definitely. And you know, most of our clients do come when there, there is a crisis.
They, they, they're not coming to us when things are cool, calm and collected, something's already landed. And we need to help them problem solve, you know, a people issue that can't be ignored or a situation that may feel too risky. Uh, so our first job in these moments is to stabilize. We slow things down.
We contain the risk, we support the people that are involved and we help leaders and employees navigate the issue that's actually at hand. Um, but only once the crisis has been steadied. Can the real work, you know, start to begin?
Yes. Once we work through our clients that have had a crisis and the pain points, there's.
Actually this really beautiful, sweet spot that we can have a lot of impact. Leaders are often quite reflective of, did, how did I handle that? How would I have handled that? I had conversations that I haven't had before. HR took me through this process that I didn't even know existed. Uh, and you know, they, they're, they're reflective of how it went.
Teams who have been surrounded or part of that crisis are generally more open to. Rebuilding in whatever, whatever way that looks like. Perhaps a, a team member exited the business because of the crisis, or perhaps there was, uh, a strategic direction which needs to be turned around and changed. Or the, the pace of the business initiatives or, um, common ways of working together need to be changed or policies or compliance, whatever it looks like.
But teams are more open. There is normally after the crisis point, a genuine need to do things better. Crisis can erode trust in teams. Mm, definitely. So they need to go through that time of rebuilding and that's where the fixing and building of. People practices that are to a standard that help eliminate the crisises from reoccurring, that is where we can have a significant impact.
And it's not to blame, but it's to. Understand, uh, because we then go through the process of, we have dealt with the issue, but then we circle back to what was at the core of why that crisis happened in the first instance. What is going to ensure that those crisis points aren't going to raise their heads again, because we're mitigating risk, we're enabling the culture to thrive.
Rather than the culture to be exposed to cracks and things breaking around it. The questions that we would normally explore with our clients were, were expectations clear? Did employees understand what they were there to do? Were behaviors tolerated too long?
Mm.
I think that's a very, very common thing.
Yes,
as businesses are growing, if someone's an expert and they've been at the business since it was a startup and they have so much knowledge and expertise in a particular area, but the behaviors behind it are just tolerated because of that, as the team builds and more, uh, people are connected into the ecosystem of that team, the less tolerance.
Leaders and founders should have on on those poor behaviors. Mm-hmm. Um. Another question that we would generally ask is, were managers or leaders supported? Do the managers know how to manage? Do leaders know how to lead? Are they given the right skills or are they technical experts who have just been asked to performance manage individuals within the team, um, without an understanding of how to hold people accountable on a day-to-day basis for their performance.
Was culture assumed instead of reinforced. And this is a really big one for us being culture experts. So culture. In a really, in a really small team, culture is assumed, but as you have people that are connecting into the business, it's really important that companies go through the process of articulating what their values are, you know, understanding what their.
Rhythms, rituals and reflections are throughout the years, understanding what the company policies are, understanding what the guardrails of working for that particular organization are, and in absence of all of that in place, it's really difficult to hold people accountable for maintaining the culture.
Hmm.
So they're the types of things that we would generally uncover in that sweet spot just after the crisis point.
Mm-hmm. And how many times do new clients come to us and say, I wish we had engaged with you sooner, or, I wish we'd done this sooner even? You know, I wish we had contracts in place because they didn't have a contract in place and there was a payroll issue.
Um, so, you know, when, when we're building culture after crisis, we are building trust, as you said, which can be quite difficult. Um, it is possible, but it's, it's slower. Mm-hmm. You know, people's emotions are at play. Um, and it is a little bit more complex to resolve once a crisis has happened.
Mm-hmm.
Um. You know, if, if HR had been flowing well, um, and in place before a crisis, it's, it's not to say that, you know, you need HR and the crisis wouldn't have happened, but, you know, early support helps leaders identify potential signs and warnings before something is to occur.
Mm.
So, you know, it helps address pain points well. Or before they come? Painful.
Mm. I think it comes back to what we spoke about in the last episode about hr looking at the patterns Ah, yes. Of people practices. Yes. Rather than just the problems. Problems are isolated.
Mm.
Crisis points are isolated problems.
Until you. Uncover what the patterns are to get to the core of why that crisis emerged in the first place,
and then not being reactive.
Mm.
Yes.
I honestly believe that no business is too small for hr. As soon as you and. Sole traders don't need hr. They don't have any employees. But when you look at it from a business perspective, is there, if there is a team and team could be two or three people, if you know that you want to grow and you know that you're going to have more than two or three employees.
Being able to engage in HR early so that they can set the patterns. Mm-hmm. They can set the cadence, they can set the touch points, um, for performance check-ins, for policies, for, um, the standards of work that, uh, the team would be held accountable too, and they help the founders and the leaders navigate that on a day-to-day.
Week by week. Yeah. Perspective. It does if we're, if we are able to work in that proactive space. We do often mitigate a lot of crisises.
Yeah, I agree.
There will be exceptions to that, but even the business' tolerances over time that they wouldn't leave a performance issue. Going on for an extended period of time.
If they've engaged each other. They'll often have those conversations when they're just going, oh, something's a bit off with this employee. Or, you know, they've, they've been showing up late to work and we think it's an attitudinal thing. How do we address that? So they're really able to have those conversations, those types of conversations really.
Early and upfront and proactively, rather than reactively addressing them through points of crisis.
You know, it's, it's all well and good to engage in a HR person, but obviously these small businesses that we're talking about, they don't need a full-time HR person.
Mm-hmm. The beauty of the work that not only we do, I mean there's a, there's a lot of HR consultants out there these days, but.
I feel the mindset of how to engage HR is becoming a lot more flexible. Small businesses don't need a full-time HR manager. No, definitely
not.
And often businesses as they grow, if they identify that they need an internal HR resource, usually it's kind of stuck on the office manager or the CFO would take on HR or somebody in the business kind of has it attached to their title, um, or.
They'll say, okay, let's get a resource, and they'll get a HR administrator or someone that can work quite operationally, businesses need strategic high level. Experts in HR to help them set the foundations when it gets to the stage that they've got things in place and it's just maintaining, uh, the performance review cadence or, you know, sending out emails for seller reviews or whatever it might look like, that's when they can then engage those lower those lower, lower level.
Um,
yeah,
like less expertise in hr. Yeah. HR
admin.
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Or a HR advisor. Yeah. Um, but in the, in the onset, setting things up properly, the good thing about the way that we can work as HR professionals these days is we are integrated in all of our clients' teams, but we're not hr. And it is, are we outsourced?
Not technically, because we are so ingrained. Mm. Are we fractional? Not technically, because we don't assign specific days to, uh, any of our clients. We don't work on time. We work on value, but we are always available because we can be, because the size of our. The organizations that we work with, being those smaller organizations, say up to about 50 employees, we're able to navigate our our day and prioritize what's going on with each of the clients.
So as a whole, in our portfolio of clients, we're able to be available for them because of the nature of work that we do where all our clients are retained. And we are looking at the pattern of pattern of people, uh, practices they have across their business before it comes to the crisis point.
Mm-hmm. So if, if you are listening to this because something's already happened, you aren't too late, um, and if things are flowing extremely well right now, now is the perfect opportunity to engage in.
A HR advisor or consultant. So it, yeah, it's really the best time to engage with HR when things aren't urgent. Um, it's, it's a good time to set thi set the scene.
That's right, Georgina. So. If you are a small business or you're a founder with a small team and you feel yourself getting even slightly distracted, it might be, where's my next hire going to come from?
Or what role do I need to hire for next? Or, uh, you know, how do I say the right things without getting myself, um, you know, stuck with, um. Psychosocial claims what? Whatever it might be. How do I identify psychosocial risks in my business contract so that I'm doing it right?
Contracts are a big thing for me at the moment.
Sorry.
How do I get a contract? Yeah,
yeah.
How do I share, how do I get a suite of policies? Mm-hmm. How do I make sure that I'm compliant? How do I reduce my sleepless nights? Because I know that my people practices are in place and I know that my company's compliant.
Yes,
there are. So many things. If there's a person attached to your business.
There is so many ways that we can play a part of, uh, to set the structure, set the foundation so that you as a founder, a business owner, a leader, can focus on what you do best, which is your product, your purpose, your offering, and allow. Us or a HR consultant to take care of the foundational and the structures and the cadence of your organization so that your people practices flow.
And also so that the people that are, you are attracting into your business, you are confident that they're having a really good experience in your workplace. Yeah. Yeah. So. Get HR early.
We're here.
We are here. So if you would like to know more about Kan Kulture, please send us an email at hello at Kan Kulture.
That's K-A-N-K-U-L-T-U-R e.com and we would be happy to jump on a call and just talk about what's going on in your workplace and what uh, your people practices look like today and how we can help. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time. Thanks for joining me on Kan Talk Kulture. I'm Kylie Anne Neal.
I hope today's episode gave you a clear review into the values driving your workplace. All sparked new ideas about building a remarkable company culture. If you're a founder or CEO interested in sharing your culture story, or if you are looking to build a safer, stronger, and more trusted workplace, let's connect.
Visit Kan Kulture.com. That's K-A-N-K-U-L-T-U-R e.com. To learn more, please hit that subscribe button to hear more real conversations with founders and CEOs and hands-on episodes full of people. First culture advice. I look forward to connecting with you on our next episode.