How Moorabool Shire Council achieved a 12% lift in Management factor scores with Culture Amp

Moorabool Shire Council employs approximately 320 people spanning a vast geographic area in Victoria. Unlike traditional corporate entities with a single commercial focus, a local council operates in a highly regulated environment where employees deliver essential services across every stage of community life. The workforce is split between office-based professionals (such xfas Human Resources, Finance, and IT) and frontline or field-based operational roles (including Parks & Gardens, Civil Maintenance, and Maternal & Child Health). Many team members are also local residents, creating a purpose-driven culture deeply connected to public value and community expectations.

When Organisational Change & Capability Leads Kirstin Goldsworthy and Lauren Shea reviewed their employee engagement strategy, they identified a critical opportunity to build a more resilient, high-performing culture. To achieve this, they needed trusted insights to turn employee signals into strategic reality.

Challenge: Overcoming lack of action fatigue and bridging the digital divide

Before partnering with Culture Amp, Moorabool Shire Council relied on legacy survey tools distributed once every two years using SurveyMonkey. This point-in-time approach lacked an overarching engagement strategy, creating a cycle where data was gathered, reviewed by management, and rarely spoken about or acted upon. Over time, this created deep-seated "lack of action fatigue" across the organisation, severely eroding workforce trust.

"Trust was our biggest barrier. Moorabool had a history of culture surveys [via SurveyMonkey] that were completed, results presented to management and then no action taken. The cycle was then repeated 2 years later." - Kirstin Goldsworthy, Organisational Change & Capability Lead, Moorabool Shire Council

Furthermore, capturing authentic feedback from a highly diverse workforce presented massive accessibility hurdles. While office employees had regular digital access, frontline and outdoor operational crews faced real barriers to participation, including varying levels of digital literacy and limited access to devices. This divide was clearly reflected in their historical baseline: while overall organisation participation grew from 47% in 2018 to 81% in 2026, outdoor operational teams historically lagged at just 43% in 2020 - eventually reaching as high as 60% as targeted, hands-on support was introduced. The organisational development (OD) team knew that if they wanted to build an accurate organisational baseline, they had to ensure that every single voice could be safely and anonymously heard.

Solution: Meeting people where they are and democratising data

In 2022, Moorabool transitioned to Culture Amp Engage to establish a continuous, secure listening strategy. To dismantle lack of action fatigue, the team prioritised total transparency and strict data privacy, utilising Culture Amp's strict privacy features to assure staff that their responses were entirely confidential and anonymous.

To bridge the digital literacy divide, the OD team launched a hands-on, face-to-face outreach initiative. Instead of relying on noisy internal digital channels that field workers often miss, the team physically took laptops and tablets out to depots and operational sites. They attended team meetings at 7:00 a.m., sponsored coffee trucks, and provided food to make participation engaging and low-pressure.

"We knew we had to meet people where they were. For some areas, this looked like us sitting down with our outdoor crews, helping them log in, and guiding them through the survey interface in a safe space where they could ask for support without shame." - Lauren Shea, Organisational Change & Capability Lead, Moorabool Shire Council

By capturing these previously hard-to-reach frontline voices alongside corporate office staff, the OD team built a comprehensive, organisational baseline of employee sentiment. This holistic dataset gave the executive team a reliable baseline, allowing them to shift from reviewing their own figures in an internal vacuum to tracking their scores within a broader competitive framework.

At the executive level, Culture Amp’s dedicated local government benchmark transformed how leadership interacted with people data. Rather than reviewing numbers in isolation, executives could track trends against sector peers, building strong internal alignment and sustained leadership interest.

Turning insights into localised action with the Focus Agent

To turn these insights into fast, targeted initiatives, the team utilised Culture Amp's Focus Agent to identify top areas for improvement rather than simply chasing low scores. Guided by a structured Listen > Understand > Evolve framework, Moorabool replaced a history of post-survey inaction under a previous provider with a swift four-month turnaround, taking feedback from survey delivery in June to a full action plan launch in October. Following organisation and service unit debriefs in July, they ran interactive face-to-face focus sessions called "World Cafes" in August with over 100 attendees to co-create solution ideas, before refining and launching staff-prioritised actions by October. To maintain credibility, the council committed to radical transparency, publishing reporting videos and opening up the results - both positive and negative - to the broader workforce. Every successfully executed initiative was physically branded with a "product of the culture survey" stamp, explicitly linking employee feedback to visible organisational change.

Scaling manager enablement with AI Coach

When the time came to interpret results from their most recent survey cycle, the team introduced Culture Amp AI Coach. Grounded in people science, AI Coach enabled the OD team to rapidly surface key themes and identify micro-demographics experiencing engagement drops. Previously, manually unpacking these results and preparing tailored debriefs took the OD team weeks. With AI Coach, deep-dive analysis could be conducted live during manager sessions without extensive pre-work, decentralising Service Unit results and empowering non-executive leaders to confidently facilitate debriefs with their own teams.

Results: A culture built on open dialogue, trust, and ambition to grow

By connecting culture, performance, and practical AI support, Moorabool Shire Council has achieved excellent organisational growth:

• Surpassing Participation Benchmarks: Through targeted on-site accessibility support, survey participation rates climbed dramatically from 69% to 81%, reflecting an employee base that now trusts their voice will lead to change.

• Strengthening Leader Perceptions and Minimising Variance: In the 2022 baseline survey, the general perception of how leaders showed up and how they were viewed by people was initially strong, yet the data highlighted key demographic gaps with up to a 50% variance at the team level. Following targeted data-backed interventions—such as executive coffee meet-and-greets, quarterly updates, and increased visibility into decision-making minutes—Moorabool’s Management factor emerged in 2026 as once again their highest performance factor at 82% favourable (a 12% increase since 2022). Crucially, team variance dropped significantly, tightening to a span between 65% and 95%, proving that leaders across all service lines are consistently showing up and prioritising employee well-being.

• Transforming Reward and Recognition (R&R): Feedback from the platform directly informed the creation of a formal Reward & Recognition framework. This included launching the "Celebrate @ Moorabool" annual staff event, culminating in an 11% increase in the organisation's overall R&R factor score since 2022.

• Fostering Career Development: Dedicated leadership enablement initiatives resulted in a 14% increase in employees reporting that their managers show a genuine interest in their long-term career progression.

"For me, the turning point was seeing executive and staff teams level up their investment. Leaders are actively asking when they get access to results because they genuinely care about taking a detailed, proactive understanding alongside their people." - Lauren Shea, Organisational Change & Capability Lead, Moorabool Shire Council

Reflecting on their journey, the OD leads reduced their strategic action planning cycle from three years to two years to maintain momentum and ensure the organisation retains tight, direct influence over its culture strategy. By integrating Culture Amp Engage and decentralising insights with AI Coach, Moorabool Shire Council has transformed employee listening from an administrative task into a core pillar of strategic success.