Technology company OneStop turned its attention to hybrid work, talent management and learning and development as part of its revamped employee experience strategy. Here’s how its People & Culture team succeeded in boosting engagement and reducing turnover. 

Flexible and hybrid work models continue to be a mixed bag for business leaders and employers in 2025. Some organisations have adopted a remote-friendly environment, such as Atlassian’s distributed work model, while others are opting for more structured hybrid arrangements or asking employees to come back into the physical workspace in a full-time capacity. 

However, while expectations vary across industries and organisations, flexible working arrangements are increasingly becoming non-negotiable for many employees and prospective candidates. A 2024 Mercer report based on data from 502 Australian organisations across a variety of industries and sectors, found that a third of employees would forgo a pay rise in favour of flexible hours, reduced hours or compressed work weeks.

Mercer also found that hybrid working – when managed well – had a positive impact on engagement and wellbeing, with the potential to boost inclusion through expanding the talent pool. The report highlighted close links between a flexible working culture and overall performance, including revenue growth.

For OneStop, a Sydney-headquartered software technology company servicing the global port community, adopting a hybrid way of working was a simple decision. In fact, what the organisation calls an ‘ultra-hybrid work model’ forms a core aspect of its recently refreshed employee experience strategy, which earned its People & Culture team an award for Best Employee Experience Strategy at the 2024 AHRI Awards and Scholarship event. 

COVID certainly reshaped the business landscape and by late 2021, OneStop recognised the need to evolve their employee experience to address talent attraction and retention challenges. 

Paired with a competitive tech market, Russell Khan, its Chief People Officer, says the business had an opportunity to rethink its candidate and employee experience. 

By taking a holistic approach throughout the employee lifecycle, Khan and his People & Culture team led the charge to strengthen OneStop’s employee value proposition and develop a more sustainable employee engagement strategy. 

See the full list of AHRI 2024 award winners.

Championing ultra-hybrid work

Khan attributes OneStop’s flexible work policy, OneStop Flex, as a key success factor for enriching the employee experience. 

Following the pandemic, the organisation transitioned from at least three days in the office per week to a more remote-friendly workplace. Aside from any scheduled ‘employee days’, such as town hall meetings, or where an employee is required to perform specific job functions that require them to be in-person (e.g. training), each team is free to determine their own approach to work. Most employees come into the office at least one day per week, in line with OneStop’s culture of connection and collaboration, says Khan.

“Flexibility is something that people in the [technology] industry expect and a lot of the bigger players offer that,” he says. “We’ve got part of our teams offshore in a couple of different countries, so technology is always going to be a part of how we work together.”

Ultra-hybrid working arrangements are not only an essential aspect of OneStop’s global business model, but also essential to serving the different needs of its workforce. 

For example, the company offers employees the option to work from anywhere in the world for up to eight weeks in total in the year. While it can’t be used up all at once, the benefit is designed to enable people to work at their best, says Khan.

“Some people use it to go up the coast for a week in an Airbnb and work from somewhere different. Some people go back to their home country to see their parents – we have a lot of people who moved to Australia from overseas and have families overseas. 

“It’s different for everyone, but I think it’s a very appealing benefit to pretty much everyone in the business.”

In Khan’s view, an ultra-hybrid way of working moves the workforce towards better work-life integration.

“I’ve got people on my team that do the kids’ drop-off early in the morning and have to duck out for 20 minutes to do the pick-up [later in the day]. Flexibility is about figuring out how we can work around those things. It doesn’t have to be a nine-to-five kind of model; that’s not really how businesses work these days.”

“Flexibility is about figuring out how we can work around those things. It doesn’t have to be a nine-to-five kind of model; that’s not really how businesses work these days.” – Russell Khan, Chief People Officer, OneStop

Streamlining talent management

Another challenge OneStop’s People & Culture team addressed was a dependency on manual recruitment and talent management processes. For instance, all job applications were submitted and reviewed through email. 

This not only led to knowledge sharing gaps between hiring managers and organisational stakeholders but also made for an unappealing initial touchpoint that compromised attraction efforts. 

Khan additionally identified information gaps across the organisation; most people and company policies were communicated through a 50-page “HR manual”. 

There was a clear need to streamline the employee experience from top to tail.

In response, Khan’s team introduced a new e-recruitment platform to replace inefficient hiring systems and help equip people leaders with the right tools throughout the process.

“I think people should have a good experience interacting with the company from the very beginning,” says Khan. “The e-system made for a better candidate experience. We stopped losing applications because they were buried in emails, and managers had an easier hiring experience.” 

OneStop’s People & Culture team also undertook an audit of its existing benefits package, and continually seeks input from employees, through pulse surveys and its employee consultative committee ‘Team Bravo’, to ensure the employee experience is relevant and inclusive of a diverse workforce. 

For example, a review of a pre-existing financial wellbeing initiative revealed good but slightly underutilised uptake across the workforce. In response, Khan’s team identified benefits centred around fitness and wellness, and discussed these in conjunction with Team Bravo to develop a more holistic wellbeing offering that now enjoys a higher utilisation across the organisation.

The expansion of the work from anywhere initiative from four to eight weeks was another effective change developed in collaboration with the committee.

Read HRM’s article on adopting a codesign approach.

“Don’t assume what people want; ask them. You can’t always survey the whole company, but an employee feedback group can help test ideas and policies,” says Khan. “Use them as a way of measuring the feedback from the business. It’s taking them on the journey, but it [also] gives people the opportunity to get more involved.”

Reshaping learning and development

Providing career development pathways and fostering a culture of learning has been recognised time and time again as an effective way to keep employees engaged, while also boosting high performance. 

As part of its strategy, OneStop integrated technology into its learning and development approach to expand training opportunities and upskill the workforce.

“As a technology company, we should be showing people internally how we use technology and tools to make their experience better, whether they’re an employee or a people leader,” says Khan.

Goal-setting, performance reviews, learning and compliance training have all been centralised across carefully chosen digital platforms. By working closely with leadership and maintaining consistent communication, Khan’s team have been able to effectively partner with the business and achieve large-scale adoption across the organisation.

In fact, one of the more pleasing outcomes has been seeing employees use the platforms for self-directed learning beyond their subject matter expertise. Khan cites software developers who have accessed photography courses, as an example. This means the learning platform not only functions as a critical capability uplift for OneStop’s workforce, but also a retention tool for employees looking to expand their learning.

The People & Culture team’s efforts to transform the employee experience at OneStop have paid dividends, cutting turnover by almost half and increasing employee engagement by almost 40 per cent since they began their journey of change in 2021. 

Additionally, because of the improvements in the employee experience, employee evaluations of OneStop as a great place to work increased by almost 40 per cent over the past three years.

For Khan, winning AHRI’s award and receiving the peer-to-peer industry recognition for his team’s efforts was just the “icing on the cake”. It’s also testament to his belief that employee experience shouldn’t be a one-and-done conversation.

“I always say to the other leaders in the company, if you take away all the people, you’ve got a company name and an empty office, right?

“If you look after your people, the results will come, not just in terms of engagement, but also business success, because more engaged employees drive better business results.”

Unlock the skills and tools you need to attract and retain top-tier talent for your organisation with AHRI’s The Employee Value Proposition short course.