“If we weren’t willing to be measured, we had no business asking customers to care about how their teams felt.”
Albert Chu · Chief of Staff, Hampr
Company size
Micro (under 30 employees), headquartered in Sydney and operating across Australia and New Zealand
Segment
Workplace hospitality technology: catering, pantry, events and staffing for large businesses
Recognition
Great Place To Work Certified™ 2025, on its first survey
Hampr’s product is often central to other, usually much bigger, companies’ culture. The Sydney-based platform connects large businesses on the ethos that shared meals hold workplaces together. In 2025 the company put its people through the Trust Index™ survey, anonymously and through a third party. Every respondent, 100%, said Hampr is a great place to work. The figure at a typical Australian company is 60%.
A perfect score would be an easy place to hang up the gloves, but the survey still found two gaps leadership hadn’t priced in: decisions were being made close to the centre, and praise depended on being in the room when it happened. What a 22-person company did about both is the part worth copying.
Key OUTCOMES
100%
Say it’s a great place to work
Every employee who took the 2025 Trust Index™ survey agreed. At the typical Australian company, the figure is 60%.
90%
Offer acceptance rate
Nine in ten offers are signed. The rare decline is almost always down to a competing offer.
2
Voluntary departures, ever
In the company’s history, two people have chosen to leave. The team now numbers around 22.
5
Employees meet every candidate
A minimum of five interviewers across different teams, with a time-to-hire of two to four weeks.
Certified on the first GO
Certification is decided by employees. Unless at least 65% of a company agrees it’s a great place to work on the confidential 60-statement Trust Index™ survey, there is no certification. Hampr cleared the bar first try with a perfect score of 100%, 35 points above the line. Take it from us, that is incredibly rare and very impressive.
The trigger: the pitch started to feel hollow
Albert Chu, Hampr’s Chief of Staff, is upfront about the discomfort that started it. “We talk about culture as a service all day,” he says, “and at some point it got uncomfortable to be selling that to customers without holding ourselves to the same standard. If we couldn’t prove our own people felt it, the pitch started to feel a bit hollow.”
Growth made the question urgent. Hampr was hiring fast across sales, operations, product and its supplier-facing teams, and adding people in cities beyond its Sydney base.
“When you’re small, culture is just whoever’s in the room. You can feel it. Once you’re spread across locations and hybrid, you lose that instinct. We’d make a decision and assume everyone was fine with it, then find out in a one-on-one weeks later that they weren’t.”
Until then, the company’s read on its own culture came from monthly one-on-ones and a retention rate that looked flattering. Chu now treats both signals as suspect. “People tell their leaders the version of the truth that’s safe to tell their leader,” he says. He’s equally wary of flattering retention figures: “Low turnover can mean people are thriving, or it can mean they haven’t found the next thing yet.”
There was also the fear. For a business whose entire product is workplace culture, a bad Trust Index result is a credibility problem, and Hampr’s leadership knew it. They decided that was precisely the reason to run the survey, anonymously and through a third party. “Internal surveys only get polite answers. We wanted somewhere our team could be blunt without it getting back to them.”
The complaint leadership braced for never arrived. Hampr is founder-led and moves fast; “Do Great Things, Fast” is a stated company value, and decisions sometimes travel quicker than the explanations behind them. Leadership expected the survey to read that pace as opacity.
Employees rated the clarity of direction highly and asked for something else entirely: to be brought along as decisions were made, with the reasoning attached.
The second gap was recognition. The headline trust numbers were high, and the spread underneath them was uneven. Praise at Hampr happened the way it does at most small companies, in person and in the moment. “If you were in the room, you got the praise,” Chu says. “If you weren’t, you missed it.” For remote employees and anyone outside Sydney, an office famous for its buzz could still feel far away.
The response: honesty, read aloud
The findings went to the entire team at a company townhall, less-flattering parts included. Chu describes it as a deliberate choice: workshopping a fix behind closed doors and announcing it later would have repeated the exact behaviour the data flagged, with decisions happening close to the centre and everyone else finding out afterwards. Naming the gap in the room was the first fix.
Facing a long list of possible actions and a micro-company budget, leadership filtered everything through two questions: where is the gap widest, and where can we act without spending much? Most of what the survey flagged came down to behaviour and internal process, no budget required, so that went first. Formal career pathing was parked, on purpose, for a later phase.
1. Recognition moved somewhere everyone can see it
A shared Slack recognition channel where anyone can recognise anyone, built so remote and non-Sydney employees give and receive praise on equal footing. Recognition left the hallway and became visible to the whole company, regardless of postcode.
2. Lunch became infrastructure
The weekly catered team lunch runs through Hampr’s own platform at upwards of $35 per head, with 100% of dietary requirements catered and each person choosing their own meal. Monthly socials are themed, family-style, dressed up with props, trivia and decorations.
The change was in how they’re used: as structured connection points, and as a standing channel between leadership and customer-facing staff that runs in both directions.
3. Decisions opened up
Employees are now pulled into workshops, process design and even sprint triage, weighing in on which product decisions ship next. Leadership stays in the room and listens more. Given the survey flagged proximity to decision-making, Chu notes, leaders dominating the conversation would have missed the point.
4. A social committee with a mandate
Four volunteers from different parts of the business run events across fun, fitness and volunteering: quarterly step challenges with prizes worth competing for, a cake bake with proceeds donated to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, and at least one surprise restructure of the entire office space.
Keeping it cross-functional is deliberate: the ideas come from four corners of the business, so events land for different kinds of people and don’t default to whatever the loudest group enjoys.
The structure: flat on purpose
Hampr keeps its organisation deliberately flat and minimises middle management. Founders and senior leaders eat with the team every week. “The leadership team are at the table, not at the head of it,” Chu says.
The offhand comment about an annoying process comes out over lunch, where it would never make a formal one-on-one agenda. Monthly one-on-ones and skip-level meetings still run; the weekly lunch is the standing check-in nobody has to schedule.
Chu is unusually willing to name what the flat structure costs. Removing middle management also removes the people who would normally be trained to have hard conversations, give consistent recognition and coach careers. That work gets distributed, and some of it fell through the cracks.
The uneven recognition and fuzzy growth paths in the survey were, in his words, “the predictable cost of a flat org that hasn’t yet built the muscle to replace what middle management would have done.”
The plan is to keep the structure and give team leaders a shared toolkit for recognition, feedback, hard conversations and onboarding. Or as Chu puts it: “stop assuming good leadership happens by osmosis.”
The results: people join, and people stay
Hiring is where the culture gets tested by outsiders. Every candidate meets a minimum of five employees across the interview process, by design.
“You can polish one conversation but you can’t stage-manage five people across different teams all independently reflecting the same thing. If the culture we describe is real, it shows up consistently across all of them, and if it isn’t, the candidate would feel the cracks.”
Time-to-hire runs two to four weeks and the offer acceptance rate sits around 90%. Candidates arrive having seen the culture on LinkedIn, where Hampr posts its jobs and thought leadership, and on Instagram, where the step challenges and volunteering days live. “You clearly practise what you sell” is the line Chu hears most in interviews.
Retention tells the same story with a caveat Chu refuses to hide. Only two people have voluntarily left in the company’s history. Overall turnover has seen roughly ten people let go since inception, almost entirely on culture fit rather than capability.
In a flat structure with direct access to leadership, a wrong fit is felt by everyone, fast, and the company would rather hold the line on values than pretend every hire worked out.
Five people have been promoted in the past 24 months, impressive for a deliberately flat business which has fewer rungs. Giving people a sense of progression without adding layers is the problem Hampr is now working on hardest.
The next test: a second run on the scoreboard
Hampr’s first Trust Index result set the bar as high as it goes, and the company treats the score as a starting line. Off the back of the survey, decision-making has opened up, recognition now reaches every postcode, and belonging and inclusion have had deliberate work put behind them.
“We’ve done a lot on bringing transparency to our decision making, recognition, belonging and inclusion off the back of the first survey. That’s the accountability we signed up for.”
Growth is the welcomed next adventure. Hampr is planning for 50 or 100 people while it’s still 22, deciding early which parts of the informality, proximity and transparency that got it here should scale with it. The next two years, Chu says, are about learning “which parts of how we’ve always done it to keep, and which to deliberately let go of before they hold us back.”
