How Southern Cross used the Performance Culture Quadrant™ to sharpen its focus on cross-team collaboration

Southern Cross Health Society (Southern Cross) is a member-focused New Zealand health insurer. With more than 935,000 members, Southern Cross supports around one in five New Zealanders and employs approximately 1,100 people nationwide.

Southern Cross’ People team was focused on creating a healthy, inclusive, high-performing workplace while supporting the organisation’s strategy for the future. To support these efforts, the organisation had been using Culture Amp for seven years, building a trusted foundation of engagement data over time.

What would help people do their best work and deliver together? That was the next question for Kathryn Darroch, Head of People Experience, and her team.

Employee engagement was already an important organisational and board-level measure, which the team was not looking to replace. It was important to keep that trusted foundation while giving leaders a clearer view of where people felt connected to their work and where they were less certain about the organisation’s ability to deliver.

That question led Southern Cross to the Performance Culture Quadrant (PCQ)™. By looking at Workplace Engagement alongside Performance Confidence, Kathryn and her team could keep engagement as a trusted measure while adding context about whether people believed the organisation could succeed. The goal was to give leaders a clearer place to focus their decision-making, priorities, communication, and collaboration.

Challenge: Turning strong engagement into confidence to adapt and deliver

Southern Cross had a clear strategic ambition to continue to build a high-performing organisation. Employee engagement results showed people were committed to that ambition and motivated to contribute. What engagement data could not fully reveal was whether the organisation's ways of working were evolving at the same pace as the demands of a rapidly changing environment.

Success increasingly depended not only on the strength of individual teams, but on how effectively work moved across organisational boundaries. Teams delivered strongly within their own areas, yet leaders wanted greater visibility of how decisions were made across functions, how priorities were aligned, and whether information was reaching the right people at the right time.

The question was not whether Southern Cross could execute. It was whether the organisation was creating the conditions to execute consistently, respond quickly to change, and adapt as member, customer, regulatory and business expectations evolved. Leaders recognised that even high-performing organisations can experience friction when decision-making, accountability and collaboration do not evolve alongside the environment in which they operate.

The same challenge applied to talent and culture. Southern Cross wanted to understand whether engagement was translating into confidence in the organisation's ability to deliver on its strategy and succeed in the future. It sought a deeper view of organisational health, one that moved beyond engagement to understand whether people experienced the clarity, alignment, trust and connection needed to perform at their best.

By gaining greater insight into these organisational dynamics, Southern Cross aimed not to fix what was broken, but to strengthen what was already working and identify opportunities to move from good to great.

"High performance is a big part of our strategy. We wanted to understand the levers that would help people perform at their best and contribute to a high-performing organisation.” - Kathryn Darroch, Head of People Experience, Southern Cross Health Society

Traditional engagement remained a trusted Business and Executive KPI. But it did not answer every question leaders were facing. Southern Cross needed to understand whether people believed the organisation could deliver, and which ways of working were helping or hindering that success. 

Solution: Add a performance lens without replacing engagement

Culture Amp launched PCQ just as Kathryn and her team were preparing for their next engagement survey. Not wanting to delay their survey cycle, they had two and a half weeks to determine whether the organisation could activate PCQ in the upcoming survey while continuing to report the established engagement KPI to its board and executive team.

The decision was not whether to abandon the approach Southern Cross had used for seven years. It was how to add a new performance lens without losing the continuity, trust, and governance that made the existing listening strategy impactful. Within that short window, the team completed a trust and risk assessment, reviewed the full question set, aligned the executive team, and kept the People & Culture Committee of the Board informed.

The answer was a deliberate transition, not a wholesale switch. Southern Cross kept traditional engagement in its reporting strategy, retained approximately half of the existing questions, and added Workplace Engagement and Performance Confidence. That gave leaders a broader view of the employee experience and their confidence in the organisation's ability to succeed together, while preserving the measure its Board and executives already knew.

The team then reviewed the survey question by question, refining the wording, testing whether each item would support meaningful action, and using the overlap with the PCQ to minimise the additional burden on employees. Culture Amp supported that process by working through the new question set and estimating that the additional Performance Confidence questions would take about 30 additional seconds to answer.

Once the survey results were available, Southern Cross used a staged rollout rather than releasing the new view to everyone at once. That approach reflected a deliberate philosophy, not caution for its own sake.

“I’m a big believer in transparency, but it has to be transparency with a purpose, where people feel confident enough to engage with what the data is telling them, not just see it.”  — Kathryn Darroch, Head of People Experience, Southern Cross Health Society

The executive team saw the results about a week before the broader organisation, and Culture Amp joined the initial debrief to help leaders understand the quadrant and ask questions directly. The findings were then shared with senior leadership teams, with broader access planned as leaders built confidence interpreting the new view.

“Everyone loves data and insights. When the findings connected so clearly to our strategy, leaders wanted to go deeper: ‘Give me this. I want to dig into it. This is really useful.”’ - Kathryn Darroch, Head of People Experience, Southern Cross Health Society

That debrief was the start of the enablement work, not the end of it. Southern Cross began preparing its people leaders to work with the data directly, rather than leaving it as a one-time readout.

The team also brought Culture Amp into its live Workforce Insights Dashboard, which supports workforce planning. The dashboard uses a high-level signpost that directs leaders back to Culture Amp to explore the underlying employee insight.

Results: A sharper leadership focus for strategy execution

What would help a high-performing organisation execute consistently across teams? That was the practical question Southern Cross’ first PCQ cycle set out to answer.

Leaders confirmed a strong organisation-wide foundation, then identified where friction was showing up in how teams worked together. That moved the conversation from whether people were engaged to what leaders could change about decisions, priorities, communication, and collaboration. The results captured the diagnostic stage of that work. They showed Southern Cross where to focus and created a clear basis for action.

• A high-performing foundation: Southern Cross achieved 95% survey participation, with 76% Workplace Engagement and 72% Performance Confidence, and landed in the Peak Performance quadrant overall, the strongest of PCQ’s four culture types. The results gave leaders a positive organisation-wide reference point, and leaders could now see exactly where that experience differed across the organisation.

• A collaboration gap sharp enough to act on: Teams scored strongly on their own, but collaboration across the enterprise told a different story, the widest gap in the results. Teams that worked well on their own did not always connect as well with each other. This was exactly the kind of signal leaders needed to confidently take targeted, meaningful action.

• A talent signal worth watching: Some of Southern Cross’s highest-performing employees showed up in the Engaged Scepticism quadrant, fully engaged but not yet confident the organisation could deliver. That pattern mattered to Southern Cross’s high-performance strategy, giving leaders a focused opportunity to explore where confidence needed to be built and how to support sustained commitment and talent retention.

• A formal commitment for FY27: Performance confidence is now a named target in Southern Cross’s annual plan, with an ambition to lift it meaningfully once strategic action has been taken. With PCQ now incorporated into their broader listening strategy, a measure that started as a single survey question now sits in the same planning conversation as the organisation’s other annual commitments.

The collaboration gap was one of the most meaningful findings. 

As Kathryn explained, “The findings showed strong collaboration within teams at 86%, compared with 63% across the enterprise. This helped leaders identify that the greatest opportunity was not local team engagement, but the connections between teams, including decision clarity, shared prioritisation, resource allocation and communication.”

That distinction changed what leaders could do with the data. A broad engagement score would have told them morale was fine and left it there. Instead, leaders had a specific place to intervene. They could better identify where decisions were getting stuck, where priorities weren’t shared, and where resourcing and communication weren’t keeping pace with collaboration across teams. 

Leaders took the finding into executive and senior leadership forums in the same cycle. Southern Cross planned to train around 160 people leaders to interpret the pattern, choose a focus area, and build an action plan of their own. Teams used the findings to identify focused actions relevant to their own results. Within People and Strategy, the insight informed work already underway on clearer decision-making and on planning and tracking progress against strategic outcomes.

None of this came at the cost of the measure Southern Cross already trusted. The organisation kept its engagement KPI rather than replacing it, and built something more concrete, and more useful to leaders, on top of it.

Southern Cross is treating this as a starting point, not a finish line. Its next survey cycle will show whether that focus is translating into deeper confidence and stronger connections across teams, including among the high performers still watching to see if the organisation can deliver. 

For an organisation building its strategy around high performance, that is exactly the kind of evidence worth investing in.

“The real change wasn’t the survey. It was the conversation [after the PCQ results came in]. We moved from asking, ‘Are our people engaged?’ to asking, ‘What do we need to change as leaders so our people and organisation can perform at their best?’” -Cath Lomax, Chief People and Strategy Officer, Southern Cross Health Society