Following a significant business growth period, how can you make sure your employee experience isn’t compromised? This People and Culture lead shares how her company kept its EX strategy in line with its strong growth, and raised employee wellbeing at the same time.
A few years ago, financial education company Infinity Group Coaching faced a sudden increase in clients that introduced a conundrum for the company’s HR team: how could the business grow without stretching its people too thin?
“After almost a decade of steady expansion, client growth accelerated at five times its usual rate within a single 12-month period. We had to grow quickly to be able to keep up with that,” says Megan Reed CPHR, Head of People & Culture at Infinity Group Coaching, whose project has been nominated for an award for AHRI’s 2026 Awards and Scholarship program.
Infinity had a clear picture of where it stood. A 2023 benchmark survey showed strength areas, such as belonging, which scored 8.1 out of 10 against an industry average of 4.9, and every respondent saying they felt free to do their job the way they judged best.
It was just as clear about the gaps that emerged.
“Three priorities stood out for us: to protect the belonging our people valued as we scaled, to lift wellbeing, and to open up clear development and career opportunities so people could keep growing with us,” says Reed.
In 2025, the business set up a dedicated People and Culture function, and Reed joined in February 2026 to lead it.
“We’re not a traditional top-down, policy-led HR function. We transformed from being ad hoc to a formal HR culture that is experience-led,” she says.
Being employee experience led looked like putting its people at the centre, in the same way they do their clients. For example, employee listening now runs on three cycles: an annual, externally benchmarked survey, a monthly pulse survey and a short Staff Experience Index after major events. Results are broken down by office, team and tenure, and each round hands a small number of actions to the relevant leadership team.
The work is showing up in the numbers. In Infinity’s June 2026 Employee Experience Survey, 84 per cent of employees responded favourably on wellbeing and 82 per cent said the business supports their mental health.
“It’s not like one thing fixed it. It was about being meaningful and purposeful in what we do,” says Reed.
Below, Reed shares how the team used a product-first approach to achieve this result, and the lessons they learned along the way.
The “product of the product”
At the centre of Infinity’s strategy is a simple belief: the people who deliver a life-changing experience for clients should be among the first to live it themselves, says Reed.
“Employee experience needs to be greater than or equal to customer experience, because there is a direct line from one to the other.”
That belief shapes where Infinity invests. Rather than bringing in generic programs, Infinity built its employee experience around three things it already does well for clients.
- Money Mentoring, which gives every employee access to the same financial education and coaching that clients receive, from day one. “Financial stress is one of the heaviest things people carry, so Infinity treats financial wellbeing as part of general wellbeing, not as a perk.”
“It’s the combination of the growth mindset and embracing discomfort, because we are changing what we all grew up thinking about financial literacy being taboo,” says Reed.
- REM Rookies: Real Estate Mastery (REM) is Infinity’s flagship client education event, and new starters attend as observers, sitting through the same sessions as clients.
Over the past year, 92 employees have taken part, and they say they have “a much better understanding of the broader business” and “a stronger connection to [their] mission of changing lives financially.”
“Don’t just tell new people about your customer. Let them sit where your customer sits,” says Reed.
- Monthly Accountability Meetings bring clients and colleagues into the same room for “education about financial wellbeing, health and wellbeing”.
Employees volunteer to host, facilitate and set them up, building facilitation and public-speaking skills and seeing first-hand the difference their work makes to clients.
“Don’t just tell new people about your customer. Let them sit where your customer sits” – Megan Reed CPHR, Head of People and Culture at Infinity Group Coaching
Growing without losing the human touch
With four offices and a quarter of the rapidly growing team with less than six month’s tenure, the growing distance between employees and decision-makers risked messages being lost in translation, says Reed.
Infinity answered that by designing for connection. Every new starter begins in person at the Gold Coast headquarters, with interstate staff flown in to ensure a shared starting point.
The whole company comes together twice a year, and every office stops once a month to celebrate its people’s wins.
The team also looks to address friction in people’s days. When employees said: “We need to invest in our systems to keep up with work volume,” Infinity brought onboarding, leave, benefits, higher duties and reporting into one platform..
“Small things add up, and when you take the friction out of people’s days, you give them time back for the work that matters,” says Reed.
“We’re never going to be a rules-based organisation. But you have to put guardrails in place so the organisation can continue to grow and the employee experience is consistent no matter where you are.”
Designing HR like a product
The biggest shift came when Infinity started treating its internal processes like product design, with employees as the end users.
Take the position description. In many organisations it’s a compliance document, a checklist HR uses to assess performance and set pay. At Infinity, says Reed, a position description exists to give employees clarity on what success looks like.
“It exists through an EX lens, and then it can serve all other purposes, from training to performance management to compensation benchmarking. But the primary lens is EX.”
This helps employees align their deliverables with the business goals, and by giving employees the same experience as clients, they bring a passion to the way they deliver to clients, says Reed.
That clarity is what makes autonomy work: the business defines the “what” and the “why”, so employees can own the “how”.
Career growth follows the same thinking. When someone is seconded, Infinity pays them at the higher level from the first day, with no trial period and no “prove it first” approval process.
In the first four months of 2026, sixteen people were seconded, and six were subsequently promoted into those roles.
Reed’s test for any new people process is simple: before building it, ask whether it’s there to help your people or only to protect the organisation.
Even HR’s own performance is measured through employees’ eyes, says Reed. The People and Culture team is trialling a Net Supported Score, which asks people after working with the HR team how supported they felt, however difficult the task.
“It measures us on the experience we create, which is the way we should be measuring any service delivery: by how it feels to the person using it.”
“Make it simple, make it connected and make it meaningful in the eyes of your users [employees]. Not in the eyes of the HR team themselves. So it’s not HR for HR, but what’s simple for our user experience.” – Megan Reed CPHR, Head of People and Culture at Infinity Group Coaching
The results
Engagement at Infinity now sits at 90 per cent, above the Finance Australia top-10 per cent benchmark of 83 per cent. Its employee Net Promoter Score is +71, against a sector median of +18, and all four offices score between +74 and +78.
Reed is candid that the work isn’t finished. Work-life balance is the area employees most want to see improvements, and the business is responding with workload reviews, manager coaching and a psychosocial safety program focused on workload.
For practitioners building their own EX strategy, Reed’s advice is to design with intent rather than copy industry trends.
“Invest in what you want it to be and why. Once you have that information, that will drive the majority of the other requirements,” she says.
She also believes ownership has to sit with leaders, not only with HR.
At Infinity, a monthly celebration is hosted by the executive team, leaders take part in the same growth experiences as their people, and employee experience is reported to the board every month alongside the commercial numbers.
Most of all, she says, keep the employee at the centre.
“Make it simple, make it connected and make it meaningful in the eyes of your users [employees]. Not in the eyes of the HR team themselves. So it’s not HR for HR, but what’s simple for our user experience.”
This intentional product-first approach allowed Infinity to carry the value delivered to clients over to their employees, demonstrating sustainable business growth and high employee wellbeing are not competing priorities.
🧰 HR’s career resource toolkit
- Course: Implementing Wellbeing Initiatives
- Micro-Credential: Business Strategy and Culture Leadership
- Article: ‘HR as a product’ model
