How Lycopodium modernised people management with Culture Amp

Lycopodium is a Perth-based engineering and project management consultancy that works primarily in the minerals and mining industry. Teams operate across APAC, the Americas and Africa, delivering complex projects for global clients. With approximately 1,000 permanent employees and several hundred contractors spread across offices and remote sites, the organisation's structure reflects the complexity of the work it delivers: multiple subsidiaries, overlapping reporting lines, and project teams that form and reform as engagements shift.

Four years ago, Lycopodium's headcount sat at around 500 people. Today, that number is 1,300+. Jon Bowker, General Manager of People and Culture, recognised a fundamental gap as the organisation’s growth trajectory started to accelerate: People processes were all still managed by hand.

Jon knew that to sustain this kind of growth, Lycopodium needed more than a technology upgrade. It needed an integrated system for people management that could give leaders visibility, shift the organisation towards ongoing feedback, and bring new employees up to speed without constant retraining.

Challenge: Managing a 3x global growth in headcount with manual, paper-based people systems

Lycopodium was going through a rapid growth phase and recognised a critical need to build the people systems to support this. The organisation had limited digital systems in place to support its rapidly-expanding headcount. Instead, Jon and his team were reliant on highly manual, paper-based processes and were working without a HRIS, consistent review process, or a way to capture feedback at scale. With an almost tripled headcount, they were eager for a solution.

“We needed an employee experience platform that could handle feedback coming from anywhere and anyone. Having the science, the data, the ability to benchmark against industry peers – that was an absolute must have.” – Jon Bowker, General Manager of People and Culture, Lycopodium

The complexity of Lycopodium's structure made finding the right platform a challenge, since employees work with multiple managers over the course of a year. Performance feedback needed to come from multiple sources, and reviews required collaboration across reporting lines.

Jon and his team set three clear priorities when they began their search:

• Intuitive user experience: With new people onboarding constantly, the platform had to be simple to use from day one without hours of training.
• Ongoing performance feedback: The platform needed to support multiple streams of input from different managers and business leaders and offer employees continuous visibility into their performance.
• A unified system: Lycopodium wanted a single platform that could handle engagement, performance, and development in one place.

Culture Amp was the platform that could do all three.

Approach: A phased rollout built on encouragement, not mandates

Lycopodium implemented three Culture Amp modules: Engage, Perform, and Develop. These three modules gave the organisation a centralised, coherent system it needed to engage its people, manage their performance and develop their careers.

Internally, Jon’s team positioned Culture Amp as a tool that would make people's working lives easier, and trusted managers to use it in the way that made most sense for their management style and employees’ goals.

Rather than mandating adoption, Jon took a more organic approach. Development plans and 1:1s were available but not required, and managers could run meetings in the system or offline. The idea was that wins from early adopters would influence others to try the tools out for themselves.

The rollout of the Culture Amp modules was also deliberately sequenced: launch with engagement surveys, then introduce performance reviews, and finally expand to professional development plans. Starting with engagement surveys gave the organisation an easy, low-friction way to build familiarity with the platform before adding more features.

“We didn't walk around with a big stick and mandate these changes. We encouraged and influenced people by showing where teams were getting real benefits and efficiencies.” – Jon Bowker, General Manager of People and Culture, Lycopodium

Bringing people along one conversation at a time

Jon and his team didn’t leave adoption solely up to individual discovery, however. Together, People & Culture (P&C) and Learning & Development (L&D) began to build manager confidence and encourage adoption across the globally distributed workforce. They launched initiatives like:

• Meeting with managers individually to walk through the platform, set expectations, and offer hands-on support
• Sharing recorded lunch-and-learn sessions across geographies so everyone had the same access to information
• Reinforcing the availability of the new system through internal communications and office posters as each new module launched

Because there was no previous digital system in use, Jon knew that adoption would take time. He also knew the value both employees and managers could unlock would be the most powerful way to build organisation-wide buy-in.

Solution: Unifying listening, performance, and development

With the rollout underway, Jon and his team had a system that could finally connect what they were hearing from their people to how they managed and developed them.

Engage: From guesswork to actionable insight

Today, the organisation automates listening across the entire employee lifecycle with:

• One-week and one-month onboarding surveys triggered automatically for every new hire
• Exit surveys running continuously with no manual triggering required
• Science-backed survey templates designed to surface accurate, actionable results
• Industry benchmarking giving leaders context for what the data actually means

Jon and his team review the results monthly, looking for emerging themes and tracking shifts in the onboarding and exit experience so they can take meaningful action. For example, when onboarding feedback pointed to gaps in the induction process, L&D leaders worked with larger business groups to improve training modules, creating a direct line from survey insight to action.

“Before, it was mostly a guess where we sat. The first engagement survey gave us real data within days that we could put in front of leaders.” – Jon Bowker, General Manager of People and Culture, Lycopodium

Perform: Giving managers the tools to have better conversations

Perform’s science-backed templates, proven review frameworks, and user-friendly functionalities make it easier for managers to give feedback that is both consistent and meaningful:

• Split-screen functionality shows an employee's full history alongside the current review
• Collaboration tools allow multiple leaders to contribute to a single review
• Continuous feedback enables employees to give, receive, and request feedback throughout the year
• Streamlined calibrations can be completed within a day or two of the performance cycle closing

With regular performance conversations happening throughout the year, managers can now use annual reviews as a strategic look forward rather than a recap of what has already taken place.

Develop: Turning career conversations into a two-way commitment

Develop gives managers and employees a dedicated space for growth conversations, separate from the performance review cycle. Development plans aren't mandated, but they are non-negotiable for any employee pursuing a promotion. Lycopodium’s development plans entail:

• A defined scope of development
• A clear timeline for goal completion
• Alignment between employee and manager on specific plan requirements
• Final sign-off from both parties before a plan is implemented

Open conversations about development paths helped reset expectations and focus effort where it actually matters. Many employees found that areas they worried about were already on track, while others started to see new possibilities for their growth. And managers have come away with a clearer picture of where people need support, as well as progress that had previously gone unnoticed.

“There weren’t many platforms that could do engagement, performance, and development well in one intuitive place. Culture Amp was the one that ticked all three boxes.” – Jon Bowker, General Manager of People and Culture, Lycopodium

Results: Achieving cultural transformation and data-driven clarity

Four years of investing in how Lycopodium listens, manages performance, and supports development has reshaped the employee experience. What started as replacing paper-based processes has become a system that helps people see results quickly, have better conversations, and keep growing together.

There were immediate wins across the organisation:

• Leaders receive engagement survey results within days of a survey closing, replacing years of guesswork.
• Calibration sessions that once took weeks on paper can be wrapped up within a day or two of the performance cycle closing.
• People & Culture and managers are free to focus on having conversations rather than the administrative tasks that once monopolised their time.

These early results have also translated into measurable changes in how people experience work at Lycopodium, including:

• +11% in engagement survey participation to 91%
• +16 points in commitment to acting on employee feedback
• +9 points in access to learning and development, following the Develop launch
• +4 points in manager interest in career aspirations
• 74% engagement score, 5% above the 69% industry benchmark
• 100% manager review completion
• 75% self-reflection completion

“The systems we’ve put in place, including Culture Amp, have enabled us to grow. I don’t know how we’d manage this scale if we were still doing it all manually.” – Jon Bowker, General Manager of People and Culture, Lycopodium

The next phase: Building on strong foundations with AI

With the people foundation in place, Jon and his team are now exploring how AI can amplify what managers are already doing well. The organisation is beginning to incorporate Culture Amp’s AI Coach capabilities with:

• AI-generated summaries of engagement survey comments that surface key employee experience themes across hundreds of responses
• Writing support for performance reviews that helps managers deliver clearer, more consistent feedback
• An AI assistant that supports managers in making better decisions in the flow of work

Lycopodium’s next chapter is about using that same system to support the next wave of growth. Jon and his team are dedicated to providing leaders with better insight and less administrative work, and people management infrastructure that can keep pace with the business.

“Leaders now talk confidently about the next stage of growth because they know they have the pillars, structures, and processes in place to support it.” – Jon Bowker, General Manager of People and Culture, Lycopodium