Ella Brennecke on why your people team cannot create your culture

The episode

Ella Brennecke runs People Operations at Everlab, and she has never held a traditional HR job. A decade in hospitality and experience design, then Founder Success at Blackbird Ventures, then guest experience at Unyoked, and nine months into this role. Everlab raised AU$65m in June led by Airtree, and has more than 130 people across Sydney and Melbourne. They are still in the same head office in Surry Hills.

She cannot force 130 people across two offices to connect, and she knows it. What she can do is build the conditions that make connection likely. Nail the operations first, and there is room left over for the surprise and delight that makes a culture feel like one. She and James get into onboarding that starts before day one, an ownership principle that runs through hiring and customer care alike, and the one everybody should steal: every single person at Everlab sits with customer care once a quarter, so nobody drifts far from the person the product is for.

What we get into

• 01A people and culture team cannot create culture for an organisation. Ella builds rituals and resources instead, then leaves it to people to pull the threads they want.
• 02She sent out a stack of resumes with warm intros and did not get a single interview. So she stopped applying the normal way and started targeting companies that had nobody in HR yet.
• 03Every single person at Everlab sits with customer care every quarter. Not once at induction, every quarter. They hear what customers are actually asking and where the pressure points are, so nobody gets to drift far from the person the product is for.
• 04Everybody unpacks the dishwasher. If you walk past a problem it is yours, whether it is in your job description or not, and the same rule covers a customer issue.
• 05New hires go through the full Everlab health protocol before they start, bloods and DEXA scan included. Ella calls it expensive and does it anyway, because if health is the most important thing for customers it has to be the most important thing for the team.
• 06Onboarding is the first thing that breaks as you scale, and Ella designs it to start from the moment someone signs rather than the moment they arrive.
• 07The real tension in AI-assisted hiring. She uses AI to sort and synthesise, never to judge, and she still reads every cover letter that a human took the time to write.

Lines worth keeping

Tap to copy, then drop it into a post.

Why it matters

Most Australian companies wait for someone with an HR title before they build a culture function, and by then the habits have set. Ella shows what it looks like to build one at 130 people while the company is still growing underneath you.