Culture & Productivity
Jo Geraghty - Former Head of HR for Goldman Sachs
Former Head of HR for Goldman Sachs France and Switzerland, Jo has 16 years of experience in change management across investment banks. She is Co-Founder and Director of Culture Consultancy, and a recognised expert in high performance culture. She is co-author of the bestselling book, Building A Culture of Innovation.
Q: How have you seen culture evolve in response to hybrid working, wellbeing priorities and the return-to-work conversation?
The biggest shift is the realisation that we can’t just 'lift and shift' old office cultures into a hybrid world. Most organisational cultures were designed for face-to-face visibility; they are not fit for purpose for 2026.
"We are seeing a move towards 'Intentional Culture Redesign'. "
We have to rebuild culture to function asynchronously. As my colleague David Liversage notes, we are moving from a culture of 'presence' to a culture of ‘connection'. This requires revisiting the company’s values, behaviours, processes, policies and ways of working to ensure they work for a hybrid community. The future requires a redesigned physical ecosystem to support this. If the home is for admin, the office must be for high-value connection and high-value focus.
Personalised workspaces are becoming key. We partner with companies like Kabin to support the redesign of physical spaces, ensuring they get the best out of employees by allowing them to work as they need to - this is especially beneficial to neurodiverse employees, but helpful for all. Alongside culture redesign, individual mindset and nervous system readiness is critical, particularly for employees experiencing anxiety, imposter syndrome or visibility pressure.
Working alongside Therapeutic Coaches to empower individuals with tools to be able to centre and ground themselves in environments that can feel overwhelming is essential in people's return to an office environment.
Q: What approaches or metrics have you seen work best in capturing what matters to employees?
At CC, we believe metrics around culture, wellbeing, inclusion etc. are essential, even though companies typically find them tricky to build. The approach we use with clients is the Culture Consultancy 'Culture Dashboard.' Instead of looking at a single engagement score, this dashboard acts as a central place for leaders, aggregating real-time data to give a holistic view of organisational health. It combines sentiment data (how people feel) with operational data (how people work). To truly capture wellbeing in 2026, we are adding these tangible metrics to the dashboard:
Digital Intensity & 'After-Hours' Traffic: We measure the volume of emails, Slack messages, and Teams calls occurring outside of core hours. High volume here is a leading indicator of 'always-on' burnout and a lack of respect for boundaries.
The Focus-to-Meeting Ratio: We track the ratio of time spent in back-to-back meetings versus blocked 'Deep Work' time. If employees have less than 2 hours of continuous focus time a day, you have a structural productivity issue, not a people issue.
Leave Quality: Are people taking full weeks to disconnect, or just random Fridays to catch up on life admin? We look for 'Rest Deficits.' Manager Connection Frequency: We track the adherence to 1:1 check-ins. Data shows that when regular, high-quality coaching conversations drop, engagement plummets four weeks later.
Psychological Safety Index: Pulse questions such as, 'Is it safe to take a risk in this team?' or 'If I make a mistake, will it be held against me?'
It is vital to measure because in a hybrid world, managers have lost their peripheral vision. You can no longer see someone slumped at their desk or staying late in the office. Without this data on workload capacity and communication, leaders are flying blind.
The Culture Dashboard restores that visibility, allowing you to spot the early warning signs of stress - like rising digital intensity - and intervene before the resignation letter lands.
Q: What leadership behaviours are likely to help businesses navigate change successfully this year?
This is a big topic with lots of changes required. As a quick overview, leaders need to: Move from "Predicting" to "Response Readiness”.
The old leadership model relied on being an expert, able to scope longer term strategy and forecast fairly accurately. The new behaviour requires accepting that "even the most rigorous forecasters can only predict accurately within a 150-400 day window" and instead must learn how to better respond to new realities. This involves "scenario planning" and building "emergency bandwidth" in the workforce so the organisation can mobilize instantly when unexpected happens. This ensures that employees are not put under strain every time a new unexpected event occurs. Redesign work with AI at the core and the human in the lead: What they can’t do is bolt AI onto old ways of working or flawed processes. "Unlearning" Mindset & Reverse Mentoring. The most difficult shift is behavioural: It’s the ‘unlearning’ of old habits and assumed knowledge and ‘relearning’ what’s required for today’s world of work. Kill "Blame Culture": You cannot have AI innovation in a culture of fear. Leaders must remove the blame culture from their teams and organisations. Shift the response to failure from "what went wrong?" to "what did we learn?".
They must encourage "diverse perspective collisions" because innovation cannot happen in silos.
Q: Creative experiences are being used to improve wellbeing and connection. Have you seen these approaches make tangible difference in organisational culture?
Experimentation is now a large part of how organisations embed their desired culture. It requires thinking differently and creating ’new’ paradigms. In order to do this we need to tap into the right hand side of the brain. At CC, we host leadership teams in a virtual spaceship where they learn to respond to unexpected scenarios; we also run Lego serious play workshops, where employees physically design the future of work, and IKEA style building exercises, where communication and collaboration skills are tested.
We partner with creative experience companies like Well-Crafted to support our clients with improving their creative thinking and help build safe spaces for being to share new thoughts and ideas; and work alongside therapeutic coaches to offer visualisation sessions. Visualisation quietens the fear response, reducing threat and self judgement, giving people the psychological safety to play, create and explore new ways of thinking and leading without fear of judgement.
Q: What are the most common cultural barriers organisations face when trying to improve engagement, learning or wellbeing and how can they be overcome?
The most common barrier currently is that managers are overwhelmed and under-skilled. We have expected managers to become therapists, hybrid coordinators, and productivity coaches without giving them the training or the time to do it. To overcome this, we must professionalize people management. We need to stop assuming that being good at a technical job makes you a good leader. At CC, we have a designed a complete manager upskilling programme including topics such as:
Managing Innovation: how to move from idea creation to implementation;
Managing and engaging dispersed teams through exemplary communication
Effective delegation and trust building; Building presence, gravitas and managing upwards
Raising team performance by understanding skills and strengths.
Further, organisations must provide longer-term resilience building for managers, teaching them how to have difficult, empathetic conversations about mental health. We need to move away from short-term 'check-ins' to deep, supportive coaching relationships."
Q: For HR and Learning & Development teams preparing for 2026, what’s one strategic focus area you would recommend they prioritise now to support stronger culture and healthier work environments?
It's a combination of the above, but the most effective for employee wellbeing is to consciously listen to employee feedback. This is not just an annual culture survey, it’s ongoing listening, understanding and adequately responding to employee needs and concerns.
That’s why at CC we don’t just provide insight into the current culture. We are known (and win awards!) for taking this insight and putting it into action - ensuring that the employee voice, concerns and issues are responded to, not just through shiny slogans on the wall or decks, but in the day to day.
