Alex Pusenjak stopped tracking hours at Fluent Commerce and started tracking impact. The result: 96% employee willingness to go above and beyond and a Great Place to Work certification with a 95% positive rating, across nine countries.
What you'll learn from this conversation:
- Why Fluent Commerce made working hours an irrelevant metric and what replaced them as the measure of success
- How psychological ownership (not perks or benefits) drives genuine employee engagement in lean, global organisations
- What "trust-first architecture" looks like in practice when you have employees across nine countries and wildly different labour laws
- The hiring philosophy that prioritises "culture add" over "culture fit" and why that distinction matters for team performance
When I sat down with Alex for his HR Influence Awards interview, he dropped this line:
"People don't wash rental cars, but they wash their own."
He was explaining how Fluent Commerce builds engagement without big budgets. The answer is psychological ownership. Instead of throwing perks at employees, his team invites them into the cockpit of the business. They see the same dashboards the leadership team sees. They understand the company's financial position, its strategic bets, its risks.
"When an organisation respects the employees' time, it includes them in the vision," he says. "The employee then respects the company's mission enough to give it their very best."
It's a deceptively simple idea. But making it work across nine countries (each with different employment norms, from France's right to disconnect to the US benefits landscape) requires intentional design, not just good intentions.
Alex uses an important phrase: trust-first architecture. It starts with a specific decision Fluent Commerce made about working hours.
"If you've got managers who are checking what time someone logs in, you're not managing performance," he says. "You're managing anxiety."
So they made hours irrelevant. Literally. The metric stopped existing. What replaced it was a focus on outcomes: what did you deliver, and did the team move forward?
This forced managers to get sharper about defining success. You can't fall back on "they were at their desk by 8:30" when the desk is in a different time zone. And with employees in nine countries, the practical reality made a traditional nine-to-five model impossible anyway.
The numbers suggest it's working. AHRI Best Employee Experience Strategy in 2023. SEEK STAR Awards in 2024. Back-to-back appearances on the HRD Hot List. And that 96% willingness-to-go-above-and-beyond figure, which is the kind of number that makes you double-check the survey methodology.
Understanding what actually drives engagement (ownership, trust, clarity of purpose) is something we think about a lot at Compono. Our Engage module helps HR teams measure these cultural signals in real time, so you can see whether your stated values match what employees are actually experiencing.
The other idea from Alex that I think more HR leaders need to hear is his stance on hiring. He's moved away from "culture fit" entirely in favour of "culture add."
"If you're hiring for an AFL football team, you don't need 18 ruck men," he says. "You need people to play different roles across the ground."
He encourages hiring managers to take final candidates out for a coffee. Let the team meet them in an informal setting. Nine times out of ten, he says, it either confirms the decision or reveals something the formal process missed.
"Their guard was let down. We're seeing a bit of a different side to them. And you know what? We've dodged a bullet."
His warning about what happens when you hire the same type of person repeatedly is blunt. The teams get stale. The capability gaps never close. And one wrong hire can set you back six to twelve months.
Alex's full feature article covers his journey from commerce law to global people leadership, his approach to running culture across nine countries ("think global, act local"), his take on the "brilliant jerk" problem, and the three pieces of advice he'd give his younger self.
Read or watch Alex Pusenjak's full HR Influence Awards feature
Every company's culture tells a story. The question is whether you're reading it or guessing. Compono Engage gives HR teams a clear, real-time view of what's actually happening inside their organisation, so you can build the kind of trust-first culture Alex describes. See how it works >
Alex Pusenjak is Global VP, People & Culture at Fluent Commerce, Sydney. He is a 2026 HR Influence Awards Top 12 ANZ, HRD Hot List 2024 and 2025, AHRI Best Employee Experience Strategy 2023, SEEK STAR Awards Winner 2024, finalist for Australian HR Manager of the Year (AHRI Awards 2024), and Transform Sydney Chapter Lead. Connect with Alex on LinkedIn.
The HR Influence Awards recognise HR professionals across Australia and New Zealand whose influence drives real outcomes. No paid placements, no popularity contest. Candidates are assessed against published criteria by an independent panel. The awards are presented by Compono.
Trust-first architecture is an approach to people management where trust is the default, not something employees have to earn. At Fluent Commerce, this meant removing hours as a performance metric entirely and replacing it with outcome-based measures of success. It forces managers to define what good work actually looks like, rather than monitoring when people log on.
Alex Pusenjak's approach at Fluent Commerce centres on psychological ownership. Instead of competing on perks and benefits, the company shares business dashboards openly with employees and gives them real autonomy over how they deliver results. The result is 96% employee willingness to go above and beyond, without relying on big-budget incentive programmes.
Culture fit means hiring people who match the existing team's style and values. Culture add means hiring people who bring something new, whether that's a different professional background, a different way of thinking, or experience from a different industry. Alex Pusenjak argues that hiring for culture fit leads to homogeneous teams with persistent capability gaps, while culture add strengthens teams by filling those gaps with diverse perspectives.