Episode Overview
In this episode of Culture in Action, Luke Fisher sits down with Charlotte Graham, People & Change Lead at Ocado Retail. Charlotte walks us through how Ocado brings culture to life in a high‑velocity, digital‑first workforce. She opens up about how the company uses its “high support, high challenge” model to balance ambition with employee wellbeing, and how recognition really becomes the glue when you’re moving fast.
Charlotte explains how culture isn’t something you just read about. It’s something people feel and act on. We dig into how values get embedded via leadership behaviours, how change‑resistant individuals often become your strongest allies, and how data from recognition and engagement tools help make culture measurable and meaningful.
Whether you’re driving people strategy, change management, or technology integration in your organisation, this episode offers practical insight into building a culture that works, not just survives.
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Read the Top Takeaways
Read Charlotte’s top takeaways in this practical how-to article.
Hello, and welcome back to Culture in Action. I’m Luke Fisher, the CEO of Mo. Today I’m joined by Charlotte Graham, she’s the People and Change Lead at Ocado Retail. She has a wonderful background across IT and people change projects. Ocado is a household name for us here in the UK and one of the largest dedicated online supermarkets.
Charlotte shares how Ocado’s culture is defined by high support and high challenge, and what it really looks like to bring these values to life across a fast-moving, digital-first business. We also talk about how recognition keeps people feeling connected and seen, especially during times of fast-paced change, and how to make a culture something that people feel and not just read about in internal communications. Let’s jump in.
Introducing the Guest
Luke: I’m here with Charlotte. I’m really excited to talk to you because I think your background fits perfectly with where the future of work might be going at the moment. So, I know a little bit about you, but people listening won’t know anything. So, do you mind just starting with who you are and a little bit about you, please?
Charlotte: It is exciting that my background fits perfectly with the future of work. I like to hear that. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, my name’s Charlotte. I’m from New Zealand, actually. I moved to London about five years ago now. And my background really, from a work point of view, is change management. So in New Zealand, I worked in the insurance industry, working on change within operational teams and contact centres. And then when I moved over to London, I continued doing change management, but more in the IT space.
So when I first started at Ocado Retail, I was in a business change manager role, working on IT initiatives, supporting the people side of those IT initiatives, and then through that, sort of transitioned into our HR team, People Team, where my role is People and Change Lead. And within that, I still focus on change initiatives—the people side of people change initiatives—but I also look after internal comms and some engagement stuff, like Mo, actually, our engagement platform. So it’s a blend of culture and change.
Defining Culture and Driving Change
Luke: Okay, good. This is good because we’re also going to dive in now to culture and what it means for your organisation and changing it. So one of the big things at the minute—and we talked about your career history having change as the constant—but organisations face this all of the time, right? It almost feels a bit gimmicky to say it now, but the pace of change is pretty rapid and there are a lot of factors that influence it at the minute. It would be really nice to just start with: How do you define the kind of culture that you want to build at Ocado Retail?
Charlotte: Yeah. We are a really values-led organisation, and I think that’s really helpful in defining the culture because obviously, you can use your values to help set the landscape for the culture that you want to have. And our values not only drive the work that we do, but the behaviours and the mindsets and things that people need to have in order to achieve really great results. So, when you’re looking at the culture that you want to build, or that we wanted to build, it’s really through the lens of those values and our strategic goals, and obviously linking them so that we can deliver great results.
But having the values as the principles that guide your decision-making and your ways of working for us has really helped to enable us to build the culture that we have within the business. And we try to bring our values to life through loads of different ways. One of them is actually through our recognition program. So when we do recognition or celebrate colleague success, we look at not only what they do—so how they’re delivering objectives, the actual stuff that they’re doing—but we also look at how they’re doing that too, and that’s through our values. So, are they displaying the behaviours and living our values, which kind of drives the culture? And so, we as much as possible just bring those through. And I would say that’s the most important thing for us that we lean on because it’s just such a useful tool, or just a framework that we can manage.
Luke: Got it. So, values are often quite an abstract concept to an employee, and therefore they can tie to, what is an example of one of your values?
Charlotte: Challenge what’s possible.
Luke: Okay, so ‘Challenge what’s possible.’ I guess people can understand in sentiment, but in practice, like how does that actually play through? How do you help them understand, “This is what we mean by that”? Like, you define the art of the possible. We want you to challenge leaders. We want you to share ideas. How do you set out the expectation to employees so they know what good looks like, I guess?
Charlotte: Yeah, we do it in a couple of different ways. One of the things we’re working on at the moment is with our leadership population and looking at leadership behaviours. And so those are all very much linked to our values. So if you are ‘challenging what’s possible,’ what does it actually look like, and how do you lead your team through that? So a lot of that is focused on the leadership population and how they can actually work with teams to bring those values to life.
But then, we actually just, in the least cheesy way possible, we try and bring the values to life through all of our comms and just different, subtle ways that we talk about how we do things here. So if we’re doing some communication about a change, or through recognition and stuff, it’s always, “Okay, well this is a really great example of ‘challenging what’s possible,’ or ‘this person has challenged what’s possible to achieve these types of things,’ or ‘we would need to really lean in here and challenge what’s possible’.” So I think it’s a, there’s a mixture of things, but bringing it into the language and giving real-life examples of where we’re actually doing it is a really useful way for us to do that.
Luke: So, a continuous positive reinforcement in both comms and in recognition activity and spotlighting, and creating the association of “this story equals this type of value.” And therefore, you can start to see—it’s like if you read enough stuff, you start to be able to understand the core concepts and the ways of working, right, around a particular topic.
Charlotte: Yeah. I think as well, you could even, when you’re talking about objectives and delivering results, you can be achieving or delivering amazing results, but if you’re not doing it in a way that aligns to our culture, that maybe doesn’t fit for us either. So it’s also a tool that we can use when we’re having performance conversations as well, to say, “How are you bringing yourself to the table when you’re at work? Is it in a positive way that aligns to who we are as a business?” That’s another way that we can do it as well.
Prioritising and Sustaining Change
Luke: And then you say, “Okay, now this is important. We want to drive change here.” And you then kick off a work stream and then you’re in the zone where you’re like, “Okay, we’ve got a gazillion things that we could do here. So how do we think about prioritising? What are we focused on? Why are we focusing there?” Do you have a playbook for change now that you’ve accrued over the years?
Charlotte: I don’t know necessarily if it’s a playbook, but I think you never want to do things that are so far out there that aren’t going to keep in line with the rest of the organisation. So the most important thing, I think, is actually making sure that what you’re doing is connecting to what the organisation is trying to achieve. And we have to think about the culture that we are trying to deliver in order for us to achieve those strategic goals.
So I guess from a People Team point of view, it’s, what are the things that we are going to do to help the overall employee experience so that we enable people to achieve those great results and deliver our strategy? And so I guess that is probably the first thing that we look at when we look at prioritising what work we’re going to be doing. But then we are a support function as well, so we are here to support the wider business, and so we can’t prioritise or make decisions without their input as well.
So obviously, we’re thinking about what work we can deliver or what projects we can deliver to build on our strategic pillars, but also we’re talking to our stakeholders to see what’s the priority for them. And that could be us actually going out and having conversations, or we have regular conversations with people across the business anyway, so it could be just picked up through those. But we do a monthly engagement survey as well. We pulse—well, actually we’re moving to six weekly—but we do pulse surveys throughout the year and that is a really useful tool for us to see: Are we working on the right things? And are we prioritising the right things based on what our colleagues are saying? And it’s also a useful tool to be like, Are we doing it in the right way? Do we need to course correct maybe, and maybe we’re not focusing quite in the right area and we need to tweak things?
Luke: Okay, now we’re going to prioritise this item. Then what happens? Like, how do you make sure change does land and sustain?
Charlotte: I mean, it’s a hard, it’s a really hard question, one that should be really easy to answer given that’s my life. But the key thing for me on any sort of change project that I work on is really being clear on why we are making that change. And as an organisation, why are we making the change, but for the individuals that we’re taking on the journey—so the teams—it’s translating that ‘why’ to them specifically.
And so that really comes down to knowing your stakeholders and building great relationships with your stakeholders so that you can start to work through that “What’s in it for me?” for each of those different teams. And then you can define your change interventions based on the needs of those particular teams or the individuals within those teams, and tailor your approach to them because there’s never going to be a one-size-fits-all approach to change that really makes it stick.
The second thing that I do and I think is really important, probably goes back to why we do the regular engagement surveys, but having a feedback mechanism is also really important for making change stick. And part of that is because obviously, you want people to feel like they have a say in what you’re doing. If people feel like they have a say, they’re more likely to adopt the new way of working or to make sure the change sticks. But also, I feel it’s important to make, we don’t always get things right. And so it’s a good and useful mechanism to be like, “Okay, we’ve tried this thing. Maybe we actually need to tweak our approach here because we’re not actually landing the change in the way that we need to, or it’s not quite working for people. So in order for it to stick, we need to change our change.”
High Performance Culture and Success
Luke: And then you’ve partly answered this with the last response, but when you think about a high performance culture and what it means to you, how do you know you are moving in that direction?
Charlotte: Yeah. So when we think about high performance culture, we use this sort of high support, high challenge or high challenge, high support model. For us, that means challenging colleagues, ‘challenging what’s possible’ and what they’re delivering and what they’re doing. And that’s not only from meeting their objectives, but also when you think about your own personal development and growth. To be a high performer, you need to be continuously learning and focusing on how you can develop in your role. So from a high challenge, that’s what we mean.
And then from a high support, it’s really around what are the, basically what it says on the tin: How are we supporting colleagues and actually to do that. And that is definitely through strong leadership, through coaching, through feedback, all those different things that we have in place. And so then I guess when you take a step back and you say, “Okay, well, are we actually driving, through that high support, high challenge model, are we actually driving a high performance culture?” And I’d say you’d look at things like, well, Are there more high potential colleagues coming through your development pipeline? Are we seeing lots of creativity and innovation in the work that we’re doing? Are our results more sustainable? Hopefully the answer to those questions is yes. And so we look at those things to say, is the high performing culture that we’re trying to drive landing?
Luke: And then when you think about maybe your most successful or most transformative project, what do you think it was and why do you think it was so successful?
Charlotte: Yeah, it’s a bit of a broken record, but the values. So we actually did a refresh of our values a few years ago and it was a pretty simple project, actually, but from a change point of view, I think it’s the one that’s landed or come through quite well. And it’s probably the reason I can point to our culture.
And literally all we did is worked with leaders across the business and got them to, we gave them some tools obviously, to communicate what the changes were and what our values are, but then also some tools for them to help them take that and translate it for their teams and think, “Well, how can I bring those to life for me and the work that I do? What does it specifically mean for me?” And so I think that’s probably the one that I can point to the most because then it trickles down through a whole bunch of other work that we do within the business.
Measuring Impact and Recognition
Luke: I’m going to be selfish for this one, if that’s all right, and ask if you have done any work linking usage stats from Mo, which is quite behavioural in data, to your engagement results. And if you’ve learned anything or if there’s any insights that are worth remarking.
Charlotte: Yeah, definitely. So I think I mentioned earlier, we run monthly pulse surveys with engagement, so we can quite easily see the impact on engagement. And we have, we look at the 14 different drivers of engagement within our survey. And one of those drivers is recognition. So we can specifically call out that score and see, has it changed since we implemented Mo? Great news: it has.
So we implemented Mo I think towards the end of 2023. And obviously, the score for that recognition driver, but also for engagement as a whole, fluctuates quite a lot month by month because there’s so many different things that can be impacting it. But overall, we can see that driver has increased since we first launched Mo. I don’t know the actual percentage, but it’s gone up from something like 7.5 to 7.8. So overall, it’s moving in a positive way.
We had some recognition processes in place before we used Mo, but they were a little bit all over the place. It wasn’t in one dedicated platform. And so we are now able to celebrate the small day-to-day wins, but also the bigger pieces of work that colleagues do to really raise the bar. And I think the insight we’ve gained from that is that just having one dedicated tool or a space to be able to bring that to life for colleagues and do recognition is really helpful. And it starts to obviously translate through to that engagement driver.
Luke: Have you been able to dig into any of that and the behaviours where recognition is really well embraced, show a kind of disproportionate level of impact on engagement, or not?
Charlotte: Yeah, again, this is quite a tricky one because there’s so many different things that can be impacting engagement. But I think anecdotally, yes, you can generally see the teams that really embrace recognition through Mo or through other routes as well tend to be more engaged and just excited and animated at work. And on the flip side of that, we can start to see where teams aren’t embracing. So the managers that are less likely to give reward to their colleagues or nominate, they are less engaged.
And actually through our engagement platform, we can track things like key terms and different things that people are saying. And so Mo does come up, and generally where you have a more positive score against Mo as a term is where we can see teams that are really actively engaged in the platform. Where it’s coming up against a more negative score or a more passive score is often in teams that are asking for more recognition. And they can see in this area, “This team is always getting called out.”
We do recognition as a whole for an organisation is something that we embrace quite a lot. So in our, we have a monthly huddle with our leadership team and we bring Mo to that. And so we talk about Mos and stuff that have been shared. We have Mo as a widget on our homepage and our intranet, so people can see it even if they’re not going into the platform. And because of that, if I’m sitting in a team where potentially we’re not focusing on recognition very much, it starts to become quite obvious and people start to feel quite, I don’t know, disconnected or just not as engaged.
So we definitely can start to see it through different routes that people that use it more notice it and people that don’t, or teams that don’t use it, also notice it and they can feel the difference. But I think part of the benefit of that, because it’s so visible, is that it’s a really easy win to turn it around because you can look at, “Okay, well we’re starting to see engagement is maybe dipping in this area, and 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 around engagement,” and how can we start to shift these metrics and see if it has a result on overall engagement.
Final Thoughts and Lightning Round
Luke: What’s the one practice or mindset shift that you needed to make in order to become a top workplace?
Charlotte: I think prioritising and fostering a culture of open communication is really important. And it’s important to obviously keep people connected to what’s happening in the business, whether that’s the good stuff or the more challenging things that are happening. Being open and honest about those things is super important.
But I think I’ve also spoken loads about how it’s not just one-way communication, it’s not just us telling colleagues what’s going on, it’s also creating opportunities for colleagues to talk to us as well, and whether that’s through the engagement platform, but also we are big users of Slack and so we have loads of open communication forums in there. We have a leadership ‘ask me anything’ channel where people can go in and ask our leaders questions, and they do, because we have got an environment where people feel safe enough to speak up, and that’s really great. So I think definitely prioritise that open communication.
Luke: I guess that is for the benefit of transparency, and then in turn, trust ultimately.
Charlotte: Yeah, definitely.
Luke: Nice. Perfect. Lightning Round. You ready?
Charlotte: Ready.
Luke: One tech tool that you can’t live without.
Charlotte: I’d say Mo… No, I’m joking, go on. I actually love Slack as a communication tool. I think it’s just, and also just bring a whole bunch of tools together in one place. So I’d say Slack.
Luke: Cool. The moment that you look at as the most proud or the most joyful from your career?
Charlotte: Yeah. Probably around recognition, but it was not long after I became a manager, someone left a sticky note on my computer about… I don’t know, no, I have no idea what it was that I did, but I’d helped them with something, and it was just the most meaningful sticky note. And I still remember, and it still makes me happy today when I think about it. So it obviously shows the importance of recognition, because I’m still feeling it right now. That’s the minor one that was big.
Luke: Love that. A thinker, author, or a book that has influenced your approach to organisational culture.
Charlotte: I don’t know if it’s quite organisational culture, but I really love anything that Adam Grant does. I think he’s just so interesting.
Luke: Indeed. I’ve got a couple of his little books in there. A culture trend that you’re most excited about right now?
Charlotte: I think just the focus on the whole employee experience, not just the one once-in-a-year engagement survey or whatever. It’s having those different touchpoints and really thinking about the whole picture for colleagues.
Luke: Love that. And then the last one is, you don’t know who the next guest is going to be, but what’s the one question that you would love for them to answer when it comes to driving culture change?
Charlotte: We are big foodies in Ocado, like obviously we are a food business, so I’m just going to base my question on that. So if you were thinking about culture change as a recipe, what’s the single most important ingredient and one that’s potentially often overlooked? What is the secret sauce for culture change?
Luke: That’s a great question.
Charlotte: Hopefully the next guest can answer, because I could not tell you what one thing is. Let’s see. No pressure.
Luke: Charlotte, thank you ever so much. This has been really fun. It’s been lovely to spend some more time with you and hear about the elements of good with Mo, but mostly about your career and the significant amount of change that you’ve helped make happen and the impact of that. So well done to you. Thank you for joining us and we will see you again soon.
Charlotte: Oh, thanks for having me.
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