Sharon Gray doesn't think culture is academic. She thinks it's everything.
"Culture is the sum of all the micro decisions that you make every day," says Sharon Gray, Chief People Officer at OzHarvest and one of twelve winners of the HR Influence Awards 2026. "Everything that you do represents the culture that you want to be developing."
It's a line that sounds simple. The kind of thing you might nod along to in a conference keynote and forget by the time you're back at your desk. But having been on the call for all twelve winner interviews as the producer of the awards, I can tell you Sharon wasn't speaking in generalities. She was describing a way of operating that showed up, in different forms, across every single conversation we had.
When Rudy asked each winner what culture means to them, not the textbook answer but in practice, nobody reached for a framework or a mission statement. They talked about decisions. Promotions. Who gets rewarded. What happens when nobody's watching. And the more I listened, the more I noticed they were all circling the same idea: culture is not something you build at an offsite. It's something you reveal through the choices you make on any given Tuesday.
Alex Pusenjak, Global VP of People and Culture at Fluent Commerce, has a definition that sticks with you.
"Culture is the residue of past decisions. It's what remains in the room when the CEO or your boss leaves."
He goes further. Culture at Fluent Commerce isn't measured by perks or programs. It's measured by how people feel.
"When it's done right, it makes them feel safe to fail, empowered to lead, trusted to deliver," Alex says. "People don't stay at organisations because of ping pong tables. They stay because they feel like they're owners of their work. They're not occupiers of just the seat."
His test for whether the culture is working? Whether employees feel their impact is valued more than their green dot on Slack. "When employees know their value or their impact is valued more than their green dot on Slack, to me, it creates a sense of belonging and freedom that makes it really hard to leave an organisation."
And when it's not working, Alex says to watch for what he calls silent sabotage. "It's when employees are nodding their head in agreement during a team meeting or a town hall, but then go back to their desk or their virtual desk and then do things the old way."
Teresa Lilly, Founder of Culture Pilot Co, draws a line between what culture looks like and what culture actually is.
"It's how things are done here. It's how decisions are made. It's how people are treated," she says. "You can say all the nice things, but if you promote somebody who treats people poorly, that is part of your culture."
Teresa has noticed that when she asks people what they want from their culture, the conversation often drifts toward events and social activities. She has a name for that.
"It's kind of like the frosting of culture. But ultimately, it's really around decision making. It's promotions. It's who you hire. It's who you don't hire. That's your culture. And that's how it shows up."
The frosting metaphor is useful because it names something most people know intuitively but struggle to articulate. The Friday drinks, the team-building day, the wellness budget: they're nice. They matter to some degree. But they're the surface layer. The cake underneath is who gets promoted, how disagreements are handled, and what behaviours get rewarded when nobody from HR is in the room.
For organisations working to connect their people data to real cultural outcomes, this framing is a useful compass. If your engagement survey says one thing but your promotion patterns say another, you're looking at the frosting and ignoring the cake.
Deepak Singh, Founder of Mission and Rhythm and PeopleStack, frames the whole conversation around a single question: is your culture happening on purpose?
"Don't think about values and not the posters. It's about decision-making, how feedback is given, what gets rewarded and what gets ignored," Deepak says. "Culture is always there. The question is more whether it's intentional or accidental."
His warning sign for accidental culture is one that any leader will recognise. "Everyone's busy, but no progress. Everyone's doing stuff, but no one's doing stuff that matters or it's stuff that's going in seven different directions."
Deepak draws a parallel between the employee journey and the customer journey. Most businesses design the customer experience with precision, mapping every touchpoint from acquisition to off-boarding. His argument is that the employee experience deserves the same intentionality.
"You can design it with the same intentionality so that each affects the other and everyone knows how they support the customer, which is most important in any business."
When he talks about culture misalignment at scale, the symptoms he describes are familiar: slow decision-making, leaders saying one thing but doing another, high performers growing frustrated, disconnection between layers. These aren't culture problems that show up in a survey. They show up in the hallway. Or on the Zoom call.
Drew Mayhills, Chief Learning and Innovation Officer at AIM WA, offers the most practical diagnostic of the group.
"You can keep a Post-It note on your desk somewhere around there, and you can just keep it as a tally, and just keep a tally of how frequently new ideas are volunteered openly to you," Drew says. "Weeks went by where I realised like, hey, I've got an empty post note here."
The test came from a Harvard Business School professor. AIM WA has the privilege of bringing HBS faculty to Western Australia each year, and this particular piece of advice stuck because of what it revealed. The empty Post-It note wasn't a reflection of Drew's team. It was a reflection of Drew.
"It's not because people in my team don't have great ideas. It's in all the assumed stuff. Drew's too busy. I suggested an idea last time, didn't really happen, why would I bother?"
For Drew, building culture means paying attention to "the small things and the big things consistently." He points to how you run meetings, how you respond when someone makes a mistake, whether you celebrate breakthroughs with new technology. Culture isn't a program you install. It's a set of behaviours you commit to repeating.
"It's never been easier actually with AI tools to produce a poster of your values and get some nice words on a poster. That's the easy part," he says. "I think it's demonstrably harder to underscore those values with behaviours and then just commit to the relentless work of living and modelling and demonstrating those behaviours."
Matt McFarlane, Founder and Director of FNDN, pushes the conversation in a direction most values exercises never go.
"A lot of companies focus on their sort of vision mission values and what they aspire towards. A lot of companies don't sit down and go, okay, well, if these are the values we expect to see, what's the opposite of that? What are the ways that we don't want them to rear their head?"
It's a question that forces clarity. Defining what good looks like is the comfortable part of the exercise. Defining what bad looks like requires a level of specificity that most teams avoid. Matt argues that's exactly why it matters.
He also insists on involving the team rather than handing values down from the top. "You've got people who will know what great looks like at your company and how to build successful outcomes. Involve them in that process rather than taking necessarily a top-down approach and making it feel like it's being imposed on them."
And when the culture starts to drift, Matt says the clues aren't in the dashboard. They're in the conversations.
"By the time you've seen turnover, it's too late. These people have walked out the door," he says. "Listening as an organisation needs to be on point. It can really just be something as simple as understanding what some of the undertone and the undercurrent of conversation is with your people."
Edan Haddock, Head of Talent and People Experience at Movember, reframes the language entirely.
"Culture is really community," Edan says. "Communities are vast, they're diverse, they're rich."
At Movember, this isn't just a nice way of talking about it. The internal employee community mirrors the external movement. The same sense of purpose that drives fundraising and health programs runs through leadership development, mentoring, and what Edan calls "the social aspect of the work that we do."
"Community needs to be the glue that holds us together as well because it's what holds our movement together and our programs together."
Edan's caution is about rigidity. A culture that demands conformity isn't really a culture at all.
"It needs to be something that completely evolves and changes as different perspectives come in, as different people with different backgrounds come in," he says. "It's the living breathing nature of it."
And when it's not working, Edan's test is simple: authenticity. "If you're not telling a story that you truly believe or is an accurate reflection of your experience, then there's a missing link."
Anna Liumaihetau Darling, GM of People Experience at Sharesies, describes culture as something you live rather than something you announce.
"I do really think that culture is something that you've got to be really intentional about. And it's a practice what you preach," Anna says. "If I'm going to be saying to my team, I want you in the office more than out because we're the people team and we're there to enable others, then I need to make sure that I'm in the office more than I'm not."
Her approach is deeply personal. Culture at Sharesies isn't built through policies alone. It's built through individual conversations about what people actually need.
"It's asking people what it is that can help enable their lives to be easier at work, or going to people. I actually care about the fact that things at home are a little bit tough at the moment. What can we do?"
Anna keeps coming back to one principle: "People are people, they're not a number." Sharesies has policies and processes that serve as a framework, but within that framework, Anna's team treats every person as an individual. "We will look at people as an individual and go, right, how can we support Rudy because I know that they're going through something."
For people and culture teams building engagement strategies, this approach is a reminder that the most effective culture work often happens one conversation at a time.
Sharon's micro decisions. Alex's residue. Teresa's frosting. Deepak's intentionality. Drew's Post-It note. Matt's anti-values. Edan's community. Anna's practice-what-you-preach.
Eight leaders, eight different organisations, eight different ways of describing the same thing. Culture lives in what you do, not what you say you do. It shows up in who gets promoted, how crises get handled, whether your green dot on Slack matters more than your actual contribution, and whether ideas flow freely or die in the silence between meetings.
As Sharon puts it, in a line that became the title of this article: culture is the sum of all the micro decisions that you make every day.
Every one of these leaders knows that. And every one of them is building proof, one decision at a time.
Read the full feature articles for each winner mentioned in this piece:
About the HR Influence Awards
The HR Influence Awards recognise the top 12 HR and people leaders across Australia and New Zealand who are shaping the future of work. Presented by Compono, the awards celebrate leaders who go beyond policy to drive real business and cultural outcomes.
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