Welcome, Laura Petruccelli, our new Chief of People Experience
We are excited to introduce Laura Petruccelli, our new Chief of People Experience, to the RMS Cloud team. Laura brings a wealth of expertise in creating happier and more supportive workplaces. In this crucial new role, Laura will be enhancing our team experience, ensuring we continue to deliver the best in our every day from the inside out.
Get to know Laura and discover her exciting new commitments and plans for RMS Cloud.
What sparked your journey into HR and People Experience?
My early career was in accounting and finance, and while I enjoyed the profession's financial and commercial elements, I missed engaging with people. It wasn't until I met a senior woman working in HR on a snowboarding trip across the Canadian Rockies that I discovered such a profession existed. It sounded like a fabulous mix of business and commercial acumen coupled with dealing with people and building a better workplace.
When I returned to Australia, I proactively looked to transition my career into the world of HR, and things blossomed from there. I have a real knack for delivering measurable business outcomes while building a better workplace for people. I firmly believe that a high-performing business and a great workplace are not mutually exclusive but quite the opposite. When you have a highly engaged team who feel valued and recognised with a clear understanding of the vision of a business and expectations of themselves and how they contribute to achieving that vision. It can be quite a beautiful thing to be a part of when everything works in unison.
What’s on your to-do list for enhancing employee experience?
RMS Cloud is a 40-year-old business. A business doesn't last 40 years without building solid foundations without good people. My priority is not to lose sight of what has made RMS great and to ensure we amplify and build upon this business's ancestry as we continue to grow and evolve.
I aim to develop solid people foundations using human design thinking principles. Initially, we will focus on role clarity, success criteria, and career pathways so that every person understands how they can contribute to the future vision for RMS, what good looks like, and how they can continue to grow and develop their career with the business.
Feedback is a gift. Building a culture of continuous feedback and developing a growth mindset with our people will be critical to supporting the business's growth and expansion aspirations. It will also help grow and develop our people into the best versions of themselves.
We are taking already good people and building even fairer and more equitable people processes that can scale and evolve with the business into a new era. That's everything from onboarding new talent to annual performance and remuneration reviews, building our Employee Value Proposition, developing our people, and embedding recognition in our everyday lives.
The ultimate goal—although it's a bit clichè—is to combine all of this to make RMS Cloud a Great Place to Work.
What’s a standout success story in elevating employee satisfaction and culture?
My proudest achievement was contributing to a purposefully built culture that saw our employee engagement and trust rating exceed 95% for three years. I achieved this by working closely in unison with a leadership team who saw the value in clarity and transparency, and together, we built an environment where people felt comfortable bringing their authentic selves to work, referrals were commonplace (always a good sign of a great place to work) and high performance was celebrated and recognised.
Our mission as People Operations was to "Give people the skills to leave but the motivation to stay". We built this culture and lived our mission through a range of initiatives such as the implementation of 360-degree feedback, dedicated learning plans and articulated career pathways, open communication through tools like Slack and Ask Me Anything sessions, a people-led focus on diversity and inclusivity and celebrations and education on our differences. We used a tool called DiSC to understand each other's styles, create a common vernacular, and trust in understanding differing points of view. We openly shared our challenges and asked for help in overcoming them. We recognised and celebrated our wins through various means, including peer-to-peer recognition, team lunches, quarterly socials and an annual offsite. All of this and more were underpinned by the values we lived and breathed.
Fundamentally, we built a culture where we treated each other with respect, valued and welcomed differences, and truly worked together as a team to achieve common goals.
How will you blend our people strategy with RMS Cloud’s future vision?
"Teamwork makes the dream work" The People Strategy will be underpinned by building solid, high-performing teams. Everything we create will be with the end state in mind.
