Culture Doesn’t Scale by Accident - Why intentional experiences drive performance, retention, and growth by Lauren Hoare, Associate Experience & Engagement Leader at Lockton

Lauren is the Associate Experience & Engagement Leader at Lockton, dedicated to shaping inclusive, high-performing cultures through neuroscience-led insight and intentional communication. Lauren focuses on creating experiences that deepen belonging, boost engagement, and unlock organisational potential.

Most organisations try to scale culture through communications, policies and presentations. The reality is culture takes root through experience - through the moments, relationships and signals people encounter every day at work.

At Lockton, we know our candidates and associates experience and feel our culture more powerfully in-person. Our culture is our key differentiator: an entrepreneurial spirit, a people-first approach and genuine empowerment to do what’s right for our clients.

As our global footprint grows, our biggest challenge and opportunity is protecting and cultivating that culture so our associates can feel it consistently across every touchpoint at work.

Human connection is central to our approach.

Connection is a Strategy, Not a Perk

Hybrid working hasn’t reduced the value of human connection, it’s increased it. What it has done is raise the stakes for how we design it. In a world of constant transformation and information overload, the answer is not less technology - it's being far more deliberate about how human connection and digital experience are designed to work together.

Technology should remove friction, create consistency and personalise experiences across the organisation, but the moments people remember - that truly cut through - are still deeply human. Human connection accelerates trust, confidence and clarity, all of which directly influence motivation, collaboration and performance.

Our culture is incredibly relationship-driven and we’ve seen that intentionality matters most. We therefore focus on designing environments and moments that bring people together in meaningful ways, fostering belonging, building trust and reinforcing purpose.

Show, Don’t Tell

We think carefully about the moments that shape how associates experience Lockton - from onboarding and manager relationships to growth, collaboration and recognition. These experiences are designed to foster belonging, reduce friction and help people perform at their best.

Onboarding is our first – and arguably most important – opportunity to show someone who we are, rather than tell them. Culture cannot be transmitted through an induction deck. We invest in designing onboarding experiences that help people feel confident and able to contribute quickly from day one. This includes creating opportunities for new joiners to hear directly from senior leaders who visibly role model our culture and values in practice, helping make the organisation feel more human, accessible and connected from the outset.

Alongside this, managers play an important role in creating tailored onboarding experiences around an individual’s role, priorities and relationships, ensuring people have meaningful opportunities to build their network and understand how they fit into the wider organisation early in their journey.

We’ve found that these small moments often have disproportionate emotional impact because they signal to someone that they are seen as an individual.

That personalisation at the start of someone's journey is also where we see some of the clearest business returns. Associates who feel genuinely connected from day one reach full productivity faster, integrate into teams more effectively and are far more likely to stay.

Managers play a defining role in how associates experience Lockton day-to-day. While culture can be articulated through values and communications, it is most powerfully experienced through everyday interactions with leaders and teams. The relationship between an associate and their manager shapes whether someone feels trusted, supported, recognised and able to grow.

In a high-performance, relationship-driven culture, managers are not simply responsible for overseeing work. They help create clarity, build confidence, strengthen belonging and unlock contribution. They often determine how quickly someone integrates into a team, how visible they feel, and whether they see a future for themselves within the organisation. That’s why we see manager capability as a critical part of associate experience and business performance. We actively support and challenge our managers to build meaningful human relationships, understand the individual behind the role, and create environments where people can thrive.

When managers get this right, the impact is measurable: stronger engagement, faster development, lower attrition and cultures that sustain themselves through relationships and shared experiences, rather than top-down intervention alone. We increasingly see through feedback and data insights that the quality of manager relationships meaningfully influences how quickly people integrate, contribute and see a future for themselves within the organisation. 

Recognition is one of the clearest examples of how intentional experiences help sustain culture as organisations grow. At Lockton, our Associate Awards bring colleagues together from across Europe to celebrate contribution, strengthen relationships and reinforce the behaviours and values that drive our success.

These moments matter because they create human connection across the organisation. They help people feel visible, valued and connected to something bigger than their individual role, while also directly linking contribution to business priorities, performance and shared success across teams and geographies.

Belonging is built through repeated human experiences, not corporate slogans. When people understand how their work relates to the organisation’s mission - and feel genuinely seen for their contribution - the effect on engagement, discretionary effort and ultimately business performance can be transformative.

Experience is a Business Metric

We're deliberately positioning associate experience as a driver of performance – as much a business metric as a people metric. This means linking it directly to business outcomes. Improving our associate experience has a measurable knock-on effect on client experience. Stronger onboarding means faster time to proficiency and productivity. Stronger manager relationships mean lower attrition. Recognition moments tied to business priorities mean people understand how their contribution connects to our overall mission. It's our biggest opportunity and we intend to do significantly more on this.

At Lockton, we track these themes throughout the associate lifecycle through engagement feedback, onboarding insights, retention trends and participation data. While the metrics themselves matter, what they consistently reinforce is the importance of human connection, manager relationships and intentional experience design in helping people integrate quickly, perform confidently and build long-term connection to the organisation.

Culture Doesn’t Scale by Accident

We have seen firsthand at Lockton the power and business impact that can be found at the intersection of culture, performance, growth and human experience – at every level of a growing organisation.

As Lockton grows, our challenge is balancing consistency and reach with the local authenticity and personalisation that make our culture distinctive. This requires careful navigation, constant feedback loops, a curious mindset and a willingness to adapt our approach and invest where we believe it will make a genuine difference.

And I’m pleased to say that the commitment is there from the very top to make this happen.

Culture does not scale through presentations or policies, but instead through the experiences people have every day. The organisations intentional enough to design those experiences will ultimately outperform those that leave them to chance.

Note

Lauren was a contributor to FourthWall’s white paper Experience as a Culture Catalyst: Powering Organisational Change (click here to download) published in February 2026. The white paper draws on qualitative research conducted between October and December 2025. The research involved full interviews with senior people leaders to explore how organisations use in-person employee experiences to navigate transformation and drive cultural change.

About Lockton Lockton’s private ownership empowers its 13,100+ Associates doing business in more than

155 countries to focus solely on clients’ risk and insurance needs. With expertise that reaches around the globe, Lockton delivers the deep understanding needed to accomplish remarkable results. Find out more on lockton.com.