Lessons on High-Challenge, High-Support Culture from Ocado Retail 

In today’s workplace, the pace of change feels less like a trend and more like a permanent state of being. For people leaders, this means balancing the urgency of digital transformation with the essential human need for connection and support.

Luke Fisher, CEO of Mo, recently sat down with Charlotte Graham, People and Change Lead at Ocado Retail, the UK’s largest dedicated online supermarket on the Culture in Action podcast. With a background blending IT and people change, Charlotte is perfectly positioned to navigate this blended future. She shares how Ocado Retail manages constant change by leaning into a culture of high support and high challenge, making their values tangible, and using recognition to keep people seen, even in a fast-moving, digital-first business.

Here are the top takeaways on how Ocado Retail builds and sustains a high-performance culture by putting values into action.

Values as the Operating System: Defining High Challenge, High Support

At Ocado Retail, culture isn’t a nebulous concept; it’s a values-led framework that guides behaviour and decision-making. Charlotte emphasises that values aren’t just posters on a wall, they’re the lens through which performance and potential are viewed.

Ocado Retail’s commitment to high performance is framed by their ‘High Challenge, High Support’ model. This is the secret sauce for balancing ambitious digital goals with the wellbeing of their people.

• High Challenge means pushing colleagues to ‘challenge what’s possible,’ constantly learn, and focus on personal development, not just meeting objectives.
• High Support is the essential counterbalance, delivered through strong leadership, coaching, and robust feedback mechanisms. It’s about creating the psychological safety required for people to rise to the challenge.

Charlotte highlights how this is integrated into every part of the employee experience:

The visibility of this framework is key. They know the model is working when they see an increase in high-potential colleagues moving through the development pipeline, a surge in creativity and innovation, and ultimately, more sustainable results.

Making Values Tangible: The Power of Continuous Reinforcement

Values can feel abstract, especially for employees operating outside of the leadership team. Ocado Retail tackled this by launching a successful values refresh project that was transformative precisely because of its simplicity and systemic reach.

The key was to bring abstract concepts, like “Challenge what’s possible,” to life through two main channels:

Language and Comms as Reinforcement

Values aren’t just for leadership town halls; they are woven into the daily language of the business. In every internal communication, whether about a new project or a business update—the team makes an effort to explicitly link the news back to the core values.

Recognition as a Values-Driver

Recognition is the most direct way to reinforce desired behaviours. Ocado Retail’s recognition program, powered by Mo, celebrates success not only based on what was delivered, but how it was delivered, through the lens of their values.

This continuous positive reinforcement creates a feedback loop: employees read stories, see the values in action, and understand what ‘good’ looks like in practice. This association-building is critical for embedding culture.

Prioritise the ‘Why’ and Engage Your Champions

In a high-change environment, a people team’s backlog can be overwhelming. To avoid burnout and drive maximum impact, Ocado Retail relies on strategic prioritisation and a clear change playbook.

Strategic Prioritisation

The first rule is alignment: everything must connect to the organisation’s strategic goals. Change projects need to demonstrate how they enable people to achieve great results and deliver on the business strategy.

To ensure they’re focusing on the right things, they use both formal and informal listening:

• Continuous Listening: Six-weekly pulse surveys provide real-time data on employee sentiment and help the team “course correct” if an initiative isn’t landing.
• Stakeholder Input: Regular conversations with leaders across the business inform priorities and ensure people team work is supporting wider business needs.

Landing Change with Leaders

Once a project is prioritised, the focus shifts to adoption. Charlotte’s top rule for making change stick is simple yet profound: be clear on the ‘why’—not just the organisational ‘why,’ but the personal “What’s in it for me?” for every individual and team.

She offers three non-negotiables for sustaining change:

1. Know Your ‘Why’: Translate the change vision into personal benefits.
2. Know Your People: Tailor your change approach—there is no one-size-fits-all.
3. Work with Your Leaders: Managers are the indispensable champions for change. Without their buy-in and strong relationships with their teams, “your change isn’t going to stick at all.”

A surprising tactic? Embrace resistance.

Technology as an Enabler: Blending People and IT

Charlotte’s dual background in IT and People is a blueprint for the modern people leader. She sees the two functions not as opposites, but as mutually supportive enablers of cultural change.

As the discussion turned to the rise of AI and agent-driven teams, the need for a change mindset emerged as the core challenge for the future of work.

For people teams, working with IT means leveraging their respective skill sets to drive adoption. For instance, in an AI rollout, the IT team leads the technical change, while the people team shapes the learning pathway, develops communications, and creates “little nudges” to help people overcome fear and embrace the new tools.

“What we can do is help shape what a learning pathway looks like. How does development around that look? How can we do communication… to get people past that little bit of fear to actually get in and give it a go.”

Turning Recognition Insights into Impact

Measuring the impact of culture initiatives is the final step in closing the change loop. For Ocado Retail, this means linking the behavioural data from their recognition platform directly to their employee engagement results.

After implementing Mo, they saw a measurable rise in the recognition driver within their pulse surveys. Charlotte explains that the biggest insight gained was the power of a dedicated, visible platform:

The visibility of recognition also acts as a powerful lever for managerial accountability. When recognition is visible across the organisation, teams that aren’t embracing it stand out, giving the people team a clear, data-backed starting point for engagement action planning.

“We can also see your team isn’t, or line managers in your team aren’t necessarily using the platform as much as others are. And we can use that as an ‘Okay, let’s now work with you on what your action plan is…'”

This data-driven approach allows the team to move beyond simply identifying a dip in engagement. It provides a direct, actionable solution: increase recognition visibility and manager use to turn those metrics around.

Key Takeaways

In a world of accelerating technology, human-centric leadership remains the ultimate competitive advantage. By defining values clearly, embedding them through visible recognition, and empowering managers to lead change, any organisation can build a culture that delivers both high support and high performance.