Episode Overview
In this episode of Culture In Action, Luke is joined by Hazel Hogben, Chief People Officer at Unilode Aviation Solutions, a global leader in aviation logistics with a large, desk-less workforce spread across 36 countries.
Hazel recounts joining the company post-private equity acquisition, facing a challenging environment defined by a fragmented culture, language barriers, and a disconnected frontline. She shares how she spearheaded a cultural transformation, moving Unilode from a traditional, hierarchical structure to a more connected, people-first organisation.
Key insights include:
- Tackling Desk-less Communication: Implementing accessible platforms to ensure two-way communication and engagement across multiple time zones and languages.
- Defining a New DNA: Rewriting company values, including ‘Build a Better Future,’ to resonate with employees and align with the company’s ESG goals.
- Fostering Recognition and Development: Introducing new learning and development programmes to build a talent pipeline, and establishing the annual Employee of the Year awards to celebrate staff and connect them to the company’s mission.
- Measuring Success: Highlighting impressive results, including a significant drop in labour turnover, improved engagement scores, and a 26% internal promotion rate in one key operational centre.
This episode offers actionable advice for leaders navigating complex, global, and operationally heavy environments, proving that cultural change is achievable through aligned leadership and foundational, consistent effort.
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Read Hazel’s top takeaways in this time-saving guide – and learn what makes culture change stick in complex, global organisations.
Full Transcript
Introduction and Unilode’s Core Business
Luke Fisher: Hello and welcome back to Culture In Action. I’m Luke Fisher, CEO of Mo. Today, I’m joined by Hazel Hogben. She’s the Chief People Officer at Unilode Aviation Solutions. They are a global leader in aviation logistics with teams spread across 36 countries, most of whom don’t sit at a desk every day.
Hazel stepped into a business fresh out of a private equity acquisition, facing a fragmented culture, language barriers, and a pretty disconnected frontline workforce. In this episode, she shares how she’s helped transform Unilode: from building a culture of communication and recognition across multiple different time zones, to building a connected set of teams, and to launching new values people actually live by. Creating a culture that really is truly lived from within and shown on the outside. This is for anyone driving culture in complex, operational, global environments, and packed with actionable insights. Hazel is really, really great. Let’s jump in.
Luke Fisher: Welcome Hazel. It’s us again. We’ve done this quite a few times before now, haven’t we? But you are now in your third organisation, dare I say, with plenty more stories to share. So for those of you that don’t know you as well as I feel like I do now, do you mind just introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about Unilode?
Hazel Hogben: Certainly, good to see you again, Luke. So I’m Hazel Hogben, I’m the Chief People Officer at Unilode Aviation Solutions. Unilode is the world’s leading ULD manager and leasing company with maintenance, repair, and overhaul facilities. Many of you have never heard of a ULD, but I can guarantee everybody’s seen one. So when you’re at the airport and you’re looking out at the plane as you’ve just boarded, you’ll see large silver boxes or pallets with cargo on them. And these are Unit Load Devices or ULDs. They are the safe, secure units that are loaded into wide-bodied aircraft to transport cargo, medicines, livestock, and most importantly, your baggage when you’re going on holiday. Unilode works with many of the major airlines across the world to supply those ULDs. By doing that, we are reducing the amount of metals and weight in our aircraft globally, which reduces greenhouse emissions and reduces fuel consumptions. So, a really green supporting organisation for the aviation sector.
Luke Fisher: Wonderful. And we’re going to talk about culture which I know that you love. And I know that you also, as you joined Unilode a couple of years ago…
Hazel Hogben: Just two years now.
Luke Fisher: …there was quite a challenge ahead of you. So do you mind just setting the scene for us in terms of where was the culture when you first joined Unilode and what was the brief?
Cultural Starting Point and the Challenge
Hazel Hogben: Certainly. So when I first joined Unilode, it had recently been purchased by a private equity company and was on a change curve—almost at the start of the change curve—with a new executive team that had been brought in. I was one of the last ones to join the team and the change was both in terms of growth acceleration and the culture in the organisation. Coming through that purchase, Unilode was a small part of a larger organisation, so it had left the large corporate environment behind with all of the structure, going out as a smaller organisation on its own. So, very much a start-up mentality with a real ambitious growth agenda, but with an organisation that had some very specific methodology that didn’t really sit in line with the start-up requirements.
So the organisation was in this huge change curve and a new leadership team with a different vision. The organisation was culturally a little bit mixed with experiences of ways of working that differed to the new vision. There isn’t really one great way of explaining the culture, possibly moving from an autocratic to a more democratic leadership style, which left quite a number of gaps in the organisation. This has been a really positive experience in terms of developing the capabilities and the skills to close those gaps.
Luke Fisher: It is fascinating hearing the story because it’s quite similar to why I started this business: a company that was $2 billion in its own right coming out of Royal Bank of Scotland as an absolute behemoth and seeing this sudden little company, in relative terms, being on its own. Where all of a sudden when you used to get a ‘no’ or a bit of red tape or a process that existed for something, none of that is there. Fortunately it was a technology company, which made life a little bit easier because we were in a few locations. Whereas your situation was much, much harder because you’re a pretty global organisation given what you do and a high proportion of people are not sat at desks every day. So talk to us just a little bit about some of even the very basic issues that I know that you’re experiencing given the nature of your workforce.
Hazel Hogben: Yes, certainly. As you say, we are globally diverse. We’re in over 36 countries globally, from South America right the way through to Asia and Bangkok being one of our central hubs for a number of team members. Over 50% of our team are desk-less. They work in our maintenance workshops and they don’t have access to all of the desk-based team members, so they don’t have the access to our intranet and our SharePoint for key communication channels.
And the language capabilities as well. It’s very easy to put out all of our communications in English, but if that’s not addressing the audience, then there’s very little point in pushing out those communications through channels that are difficult to access. So our opportunity was to really be able to engage with the entire workforce and not the few that do have access to those systems. We were looking for an opportunity to be able to engage in a two-way communication channel to bring all of our workforce through with us on our goals and our updates: our business updates, how we’re achieving against our targets, key strategies, and key information that would enable our team members to be emotionally connected to the organisation as well as just receiving a paycheck for a good week’s work.
Identifying a platform that could be used in multiple languages to be accessible to everybody was a challenge across the organisation. In terms of any Microsoft-based systems, these required a Microsoft license for every user. If you are going to invest in those Microsoft licenses, that has a significant on-cost to the business. If you’re not going to utilise the whole of the Microsoft package, you’re paying for something you’re not using, which doesn’t make a huge amount of sense. As well as the language capability, there was also the need for instant translation. So there were a number of barriers in place that prevented us from being able to speak to our team members in Hong Kong or in New Zealand.
Completely different time zones, accessibility to systems, and relevance of communication as well. So being able to identify how quickly we could get communication to individuals, the relevance of it, and to be able to present it in a way that the recipient or the end user of that information could do something with it.
Strategic Focus and Enabling Platforms
Luke Fisher: Indeed. Big, big challenges. And then you’ve got the added pressure of, I know it well, a private equity backed environment which is creating some pressure to take action and make things happen quickly both strategically and culturally. So will you just talk us through some of those early days and to where you are now, two years into your journey, about how, when you start to solve some of those problems relating to communication and you can actually talk to your workers in 36 countries, what sits around that? How did you think about that moment of transition when you joined? What are some of the things that you did and where are you now?
Hazel Hogben: There was a lot to do. There was a lot to focus on in terms of what did the organisation want from the HR function. Historically, it was a very traditional service function, doing the day-to-day HR administration side of the business. So from a purely HR lens, we were changing the offering from the HR function to the business to become more aligned to the business, to be more commercially savvy, and to try and get one step ahead of the business—foresee the requirement, create the offering before the demand became critical. So that was a key piece, and bringing the right talent into key functions within the organisation. So areas that had an experienced individual or team to deliver.
If we think about the L&D space, when I first joined there wasn’t an L&D function. A clear gap in the organisation was that delivery of consistent training and development for the team. So bringing in L&D into the organisation was critical for us to be able to meet those needs and to drive retention, engagement, capability, and internal succession and internal promotions. The results that we’ve seen the last 18 months in that space have been huge, fantastic results. When we look back at what we’ve done, we’ve had Institute of Leadership accreditation for two of our learning pathways and really started a number of people on their long-term career journeys.
Luke Fisher: Okay, cool. Thank you for sharing all of that. And then do you mind if we just dip in a little bit to the platforms, the processes, the tools that have helped you make some of these key changes happen? Enhancing communication, improving learning, and ultimately performance, I assume.
Hazel Hogben: Yes, certainly. So, two pivotal changes in terms of the direct communication to our team members. The first one is obviously Mo, and introducing Mo to the business has enabled us to put two-way communication directly into the hands of our technicians globally and other remote team members who don’t have access to the SharePoint as I’ve already mentioned. The beauty of Mo: its intent is for recognition, reward, and the engagement of the organisation. But we twisted that very slightly and our primary driver is to use it as a communication channel. It allows recognition obviously, because that’s built-in functionality, but our primary goal was to really enhance communication and the ability to communicate for our executive leadership team to be accessible to everybody, to be able to be questioned and to engage in a two-way conversation on the platform, to share company updates and key changes to the organisation. Whether it’s in our sustainability by repairing more of the cargo nets rather than sending them to landfill, this is key information to our team members. So being able to directly communicate with them was our absolute priority. Mo enabled that for us because of its language capability and the push-pull element. So we could push notifications, but also we could pull the communication coming back to us.
So that was the first thing. And the second one is the introduction of Paylocity and the learning platform that that has as part of that. So being able to create instructor-led training, pre-book training, demand-led training, and self-service training. So those two key platforms have been instrumental in seeing that shift across the organisation. But the first one obviously to land was Mo, and you’ve been in just over a year now in terms of…
Luke Fisher: Yep.
Hazel Hogben: …it’s been a year in terms of being able to directly communicate with the teams, which is fantastic.
Shifting Behaviours and Sustaining Culture
Luke Fisher: Cool. And then it would be useful to just talk a little bit about how specifically you’ve shifted behaviors and levels of engagement that you had to start with. Some fairly foundational stuff, right? The ability to communicate with people, the ability to equip them, but once you have those in place, how do you level up? How do you start to shift the behaviors and how do you know it’s working?
Hazel Hogben: It, like you say, it’s those foundational blocks. So one of the very first things I worked on with one of my colleagues in our commercial team, Mohamed Aclac, we rewrote our company values and simplified those values and made them resonate with team members. As with most organisations, core values are around what identifies us, what is our DNA. We were looking at what do we stand for as individuals? What do we stand for as an organisation? What do we want our team members to really be proud of?
And ESG is a huge thing because we’re in the aviation sector as part of the supply chain to aviation and the green initiatives and the goals and the targets that are set on aviation globally is huge. So one of our core values is ‘Build a Better Future’. Now that’s two ways: look after the planet—that’s the ESG piece—and the second one is build a better future for yourself in terms of that personal development space. So we rewrote all of those core values, rolling those out across the organisation through Mo, being able to directly communicate what those values are, what they mean, what do they look like in action. That was instrumental in the start of bringing the emotional connection to Unilode. Although Unilode’s been around in various guises for 40 plus years, Unilode as its standalone self has only been around three or four years; it’s a fairly new company in its current format. So having those values, having that direct communication and having our DNA come through the organisation, what do we want this company to stand for? What do we want to be seen by as our customers? And in terms of what value do we bring to our customers, to our people, and to aviation as a whole.
Luke Fisher: How do you then bring some of those to life in an ongoing way through either cultural rituals or communication cadences? How do you sustain beyond the, “Okay, we’ve done this. It’s catchy,” but how does it actually catch?
Hazel Hogben: So how does it catch? We conduct quarterly town halls and we make those available and we record them. So we do them live and we have a significant number of people through Teams participate through our quarterly town halls, and we record those and we put the recording link into Mo so that everybody has an opportunity to watch it on playback. So our quarterly town halls… We send out ‘Unilode in a Minute’. So every two months, one of the executive leadership team will do a self-recorded on an iPhone two or three minute update from their business function and send that out across the organisation. Again, it’s a link that goes onto Mo and that can be absorbed by the end user in a time that’s right for them. And it just keeps them in touch with that.
Our performance management process really talks about the values and competencies through the organisation, so they’re alive through that. I think the big thing for the organisation is our Employee of the Year. We use Mo for our Employee of the Year nomination and voting process. So through the nominations function on Mo, we developed our Employee of the Year. It was the inaugural year last year, and we had an overwhelming response. It was all around our values. So we had our values awards, and then we had our MRO, our maintenance, repair and overhaul station of the year. We had our team of the year, and then we had our ultimate Employee of the Year. We asked the business to nominate colleagues or teams for the Employee of the Year. First time we’d ever done it, expectations were, “It’ll be good.” It was overwhelming. It was just something that we never thought we would get so many separate nominations and the commentary that people were writing around their peers and their colleagues was really humbling for us as a leadership team to kind of look back on that year and say, “This is how far we’ve come. This is fantastic.” But more importantly for the nominees, it was a really big moment for them.
When we obviously get our winners, we announced all of our winners at our town hall in December. So we ended the calendar year with the Employee of the Year awards. It was tremendous, the engagement in that. It was our highest number of attendees joining the town hall call. It was a fantastic event, which was facilitated by that single platform that enabled us to engage with the teams. Our boxes—if you see a box at an airport with a team member’s name on it—they are either an award winner from our Employee of the Year…
Luke Fisher: Okay, cool.
Hazel Hogben: …or they are a team member who has had more than 25 years service with us. So any team member that’s got over 25 years service has one of our big boxes and they’ve got some decals on there with their name, recognizing them for their length of service. And then sadly, as with human beings, we do have colleagues who pass away in service. And we’ve got 14 boxes flying the global network in remembrance of our colleagues who passed away in service as well. So we’ve got our boxes and they are the boxes in our network that are dedicated to our star performers, our long serving members, and our colleagues who are no longer with us.
Luke Fisher: And if you compare that to where you were two plus years ago, people weren’t informed. They weren’t in a position where they felt any sense of connection. You didn’t really have much in the way of reflection, right, which is at the heart of what the awards are. It’s a chance in a private equity world that feels day to day like you’re moving a million miles an hour, an opportunity to reflect and for people to see it. And you can feel that sense of emotional connection to, “We’re all in this together,” a bit more. Every time one of those happens, you can feel the difference that it’s making. And having some of those sentimental considerations around the award winners and having a nuance that only you can make become real is far, far more valuable than a standardised badge or a pin or a whatever. It is just a really, really cool way to cement that these people make a difference and it’s important. Very interesting. I know that you’ve worked with people that aren’t at desks in most of your career history that I’ve known you, at least from hotels to where you are now. How have you got this to be successful with desk-less workers? What is, what’s the secret sauce? Because people that aren’t at a desk are notoriously hard to engage, to keep, to be in a position where they feel a part of the organisation. What do you think has, what are your learnings, the secret sauce?
Hazel Hogben: I don’t know that there’s a secret sauce because I don’t think we’re quite a hundred percent there yet, Luke. Relevant. It’s got to be relevant to the individual. It’s got to be timely. And to a degree, it’s got to be personal in that recognition, the communication, the recognition, to recognise the value of the work that everybody does. Very often in an organisation, you’ve got a small number of people, depending on the size of the organisation obviously, who seem to get the…
Luke Fisher: Yeah.
Hazel Hogben: …that their names are in all circles. It’s the unseen workforce that are as equally important who deliver that same value in a different way. Recognising and calling out that everybody who works in the organisation is equally as valuable. And for me, that’s at the heart of why I do what I do in terms of equity in the workforce. You, there are hierarchies, there are different roles, there are different skill sets, but that doesn’t take away the relevance or the importance of everybody in the organisation. And what makes it stick is recognising that and communicating to people things that are relevant to them and important to them.
Luke Fisher: Indeed. I think context, when you’re going through a lot of change is so vitally important, right? And it’s often forgotten or we under-communicate. I think there is so much to be said when you get two-way communication right in the visibility that’s there, and visibility often leads to access to opportunities that you wouldn’t have otherwise had, which can be really powerful.
Hazel Hogben: The two-way communication is listening as much as giving, and making changes that have been requested to really recognise and demonstrate that listening capability as well, I think is the two-way communication that’s vital.
Measuring Progress and Future Ambition
Luke Fisher: Okay, nice. I’m going to move us just onto the last two kind of topics before we get to a closeout. I’d just be keen to know how you understood whether you were on track or not. Like how did you monitor progress? What were your feedback loops over the last two years to know that it’s getting better and how has that matured or changed?
Hazel Hogben: Really simple KPI metrics: labour turnover, retention data, internal promotion data, employee engagement. We’re still very much in our infancy in terms of employee engagement. We did our first one as Unilode last year. It was a rudimentary engagement survey. It didn’t have a huge amount of science behind it. This year, more so we’re a bit more mature. We’ve got a different system to be able to capture that data. So seeing year on year engagement and seeing the peaks and troughs within those different areas. So last year, for example, the engagement survey had really low scores on learning and development, as you would expect. This year, significantly improved. Overall engagement is static. Labour turnover is down. We’re currently at sub 20%, and against our industry, that is huge in terms of that difference between us and competitors in the aviation supply area. So at 17% labour turnover is something to really celebrate, and against any industry, I guess. So labour turnover, our engagement data, and internal promotions. When you look at our internal promotion stats, they are really quite impressive for a small organisation, notwithstanding bringing in talent from slightly different industries to bring innovative and fresh thinking to the organisation as well.
So, key metrics and going onto the floor. I love going, putting on my hi-vis and my safety shoes, going down into the MROs and chatting to the guys and girls on the floor and listening to what they have to say. Yesterday I was in one of our stations chatting to one of the guys and I mentioned something that was, there’s some communication that was coming out later this week and he said, “Yeah, I’ve heard about that. It’s going to be really good because of X, Y, and Z.” It really does show that that communication’s coming through and that they’re engaged, they’re enthused by it, but most importantly, where we’re making key strategic changes to some of the ways of working, they’re on the ball, they know about it and they can engage with it. So that’s got the KPIs, but you only know when you actually go and speak to teams across the organisation and what they physically tell you face to face whether you know you’re winning or not.
Luke Fisher: I’ve held with me actually one of the things that you said and did really early on in your time at Unilode. I’m sure you sat down with about 50 people individually, and in the absence of any tool, any metrics, any numbers, just had the conversation. The patterns that repeat in those are so vital. They tell you probably more than any sophisticated engagement survey is going to give you. And if you can make some small changes off the back of the feedback people have given you, you start to build momentum there, right? Like change isn’t transformational in a day, but the small changes that you can make in a day can be really material. And then you start to build that momentum over time. And that’s where, when I say to you over the last two years, how has it changed? It’s great that you are still doing some of those things and talking to people because you get all of the good stuff there, right? Because people start to trust you. And leadership visibility and proximity is super important. And on those metrics, have you seen over the two years, as you’ve introduced communication, as you’ve introduced learning, these cultural engagement initiatives that are there to continue to build on the building blocks that you’ve got, have you seen it directly impact those numbers? How has that played through and have you got any kind of stats that would sit on the CV that you’re like, “This was amazing, I made these moves, and look at me go?”
Hazel Hogben: It’s not me, it’s Unilode. Because the leadership team are engaged and our line managers are hugely engaged by the opportunities and the future and the trajectory. We’ve got some huge talent in the organisation that are helping us to get to that growth target. So engaging that population—the people who actually deliver—has been a really positive experience and bringing them along the journey with us. It’s those marginal gains like you mentioned. It’s just making those small changes ongoing that build up. Start with the foundations and layer up.
In terms of stats: in our Bangkok office, we have 135 people employed in our Operation Control Centre, and over the last 12 months we’ve had 26% internal promotions in that team. Historically, that pipeline just wasn’t there. So when we think about those marginal gains in terms of that communication, developing our people, giving them additional training and development opportunities, opening up that succession pathway and then doing those internal promotions has enabled us to create a succession pipeline and a career trajectory through roles. So we only recruit at our entry level role, and then we develop people through the organisation. So in the space of two years, in conjunction with the VP of the OCC in Bangkok, working with the L&D team and their business partner in the HR team, they have developed something from nothing.
They’ve got the raw talent. We needed to put some structure and some guidance and approach—not a firm process because we’re not a huge corporate—some guidelines, a framework in place so that the colleagues can come through the organisation, clearly see what that career trajectory looks like and what the offering is behind it. So the internal promotions is a massive win for the organisation and for the individuals. Our labour turnover already mentioned, it’s come down five percentage points year on year. And our engagement survey, sitting around 75% engagement, that is a really positive number.
Luke Fisher: It’s good.
Hazel Hogben: So looking at just those three KPIs, I’m quite pleased with where we are at so far.
Luke Fisher: Yeah, absolutely. Well done you.
Advice and Closing Thoughts
Luke Fisher: The final two questions. One is for others. Given just how, I guess disparate you are as an organisation and operationally heavy, what would be your one piece of advice to anyone that’s sat in a similar pair of shoes to yours on how you get this, how they end up with numbers like those and stories and knowledge in the organisation and a culture that’s as rich as yours is quickly becoming. What’s your advice?
Hazel Hogben: I don’t know, Luke. My first day with Unilode I had a fantastic onboarding experience with the rest of the leadership team. They were so welcoming and my first day, my CEO asked me if I felt that I’d made the right decision in joining the organisation. And I said, “I found my tribe.” And nearly two years on, I’ve still found my tribe. The secret sauce is being in your tribe, having the same vision, having the same goal. Very often in the HR space, you are seen or you feel that you are not working directly with all the time. There are points of conflict. There are points of tension and, you know, having positive tension’s not a bad thing, but if you’re in a HR function and you don’t feel part of the tribe, then I think you may struggle to get those results. The results that we are seeing, it is not about me. It’s not about HR, it’s about the team. It’s about the leadership team goals. It’s about the leadership team vision and the fact that we are aligned on. We know that if we get X, Y, and Z right, because it’s not just around the HR agenda, it’s the operations agenda, it’s the growth agenda from the PE ownership. There are multiple things that are driving the culture change in the organisation. It’s not by any stretch of the imagination a HR agenda.
Luke Fisher: Yeah, you are people powered, right? At the end of the day.
Hazel Hogben: Being part of a tribe, being a genuine part of it, getting your peers aligned and you align with your peers as much as anything. This is not a one-person show by any stretch of the imagination. Everybody has input into what this looks like and working with, not for, not against—working with that team to deliver that offering, that change that you want to see. And being aligned to the business—actually really understanding and knowing your business—I think is vital for you to be able to make those strategic changes or come up with solutions that support the strategic goals.
Luke Fisher: Nice. And then given your two… Very last question then is just if we were recording this in, let’s say three years time—there’s a typical private equity journey that happens in a five to seven year horizon—and you look at the role that culture has played for Unilode, what’s the ambition? What’s the moment that you look back at and say, “We did it”?
Hazel Hogben: That we are an organisation that, under a leadership team, has a business that is solid, is stable, has a positive reputation in terms of safety in the aviation sector. A positive employer brand where people want to work for us. We have a workforce that is secure in the knowledge that this organisation, regardless of the PE journey, is a secure environment for them long term. That’s when we know we’ve got it right.
Luke Fisher: Wonderful. Right. Are you ready for the lightning round?
Hazel Hogben: Okay, let’s go.
Luke Fisher: So one tech tool that you can’t live without as a leader.
Hazel Hogben: My phone.
Luke Fisher: A thinker, author, or a book that’s heavily influenced your approach to organisational culture.
Hazel Hogben: George Orwell.
Luke Fisher: Okay, cool. A culture trend that you’re most excited about right now?
Hazel Hogben: AI, the use of AI into the business.
Luke Fisher: That one comes up a lot. Cool. And then the last one is what’s one question that you’d love to ask the next guest, even though you don’t know who it is, to answer about driving culture change?
Hazel Hogben: How does the current global socioeconomic environment impact your ability to drive culture change?
Luke Fisher: That’s a cracking question, that is. Okay, perfect. With that, this draws us to a close. Thank you ever so much for doing this for us again. It’s been a joy as always, and loads of really cool stuff that you’ve done. So thanks for sharing.
Hazel Hogben: Thanks Luke.
Luke Fisher: If you found today’s conversation valuable, we’d love if you follow us, rate us, or review the show. It really helps others find us. And if you’re feeling inspired, share this episode with someone who’s passionate about building a better workplace. We’ll be back soon with more stories from people leaders, putting culture into action. See you again next time.
