Macquarie Cloud Services
“Never stop dreaming of what is possible, and then drive, measure and pursue those dreams and make them a reality. We definitely did.”
Tony Pandher · Chief Operating Officer, Macquarie Cloud Services
Industry
Information Technology
Size
Small, 30 to 99 employees
Location
Sydney, Australia
In 2026 Macquarie Cloud Services finished first in the Small category of Australia’s Best Workplaces, its third consecutive year at the top of that band. It also leads the Small category on Australia’s Best Workplaces in Technology 2026, for a fourth year running.
#1
Best Workplaces in Australia 2026
Macquarie Cloud Services ranked first in the Small category
Top of the 30 to 99 employee band for a third consecutive year, on a national list of 100 organisations grouped into four size categories.
Key outcomes
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100%
Say it is a great place to work
Every Macquarie Cloud Services employee surveyed agreed, against a 60% benchmark for a typical Australian company.
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3×
Consecutive years at number one
First in the Small category of Australia’s Best Workplaces in 2024, 2025 and 2026.
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+92
Net Promoter Score
Macquarie Cloud Services reports a customer Net Promoter Score held consistently at +92.
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Top 3%
Global engagement percentile
The company reports employee engagement in the top 3% of Gallup’s global benchmark.
Tony Pandher joined Macquarie Cloud Services in 2012 admiring companies that had built reputations as places people wanted to work, to the point where joining one of them had been a serious career option. He decided to build the same reputation where he already was.
The second ingredient was football, and Arsenal in particular. The passion became a metaphor, then an operating model. For years the business has been described in the same terms: a Youth Academy that develops its own players, a First Team those players are promoted into, and fans who pay to watch and expect to be made proud.
The Youth Academy is the graduate program, and it was built to do two jobs at once. It develops capability. It also imprints a standard, Humble, Hungry and Smart, taken from Patrick Lencioni’s Ideal Team Player model, before a new employee has learned any other way of working.
“If I could grow and nurture the culture through the grads, and as they grow they would move into other parts of the business and infect those teams with the same passion to learn, grow and achieve great things.”
Tony Pandher · Chief Operating Officer, Macquarie Cloud Services
The model has a second reference point. Manchester United’s Class of ’92 came through the club’s own academy, were promoted together, and formed the spine of the first team for the best part of a decade. That is the pattern the graduate program was designed to reproduce: develop your own people, promote them into the core as they mature, and let that generation carry the standard to everyone who arrives after them.
What made a fourteen-year culture project possible?
Air cover from the top, sustained across years. Group chief executive David Tudehope and group executive James Mystakidis gave Pandher the latitude to run the culture work his own way, effectively as an unofficial chief people officer sitting alongside the COO role.
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•
2012
Tony Pandher joins Macquarie Cloud Services
A personal ambition takes root: build a business people are proud to work for.
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2018
An outside voice asks what the company is waiting for
Consultant Dom Monkhouse, who had built two certified great workplaces in the UK, tells Pandher to enter and use the result as feedback.
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19th
2019
Finished 19th on Australia’s Best Workplaces List on their first year certified
A placing on the first attempt is a big deal, hundreds and hundreds of certified companies are considered.
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•
2020 to 2021
COVID-19 stops the awards project
The team leaves the office and fights a different set of battles, but the culture holds.
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13th
2022
Back on the Best Workplaces List, six places higher
Back in the office and back in the running. The trend was compounding.
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2nd
2023
#1 technology employer, #2 on Australia’s Best Workplaces
In 2023 the company took #1 position in the Best Workplaces industry list for Technology, and cracked the final three for Australia’s Best Workplaces.
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1st
2024
First in the Small category
Recognised as the #1 Best Place to work in Australia in their size category. The 2012 dream was made a reality.
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1st
2025
Title defended
A second consecutive year at the top of the band.
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1st
2026
Three consecutive years at number one
Three consecutive years recognised as the #1 Best Place to Work in Australia, and the fourth year named as Australia’s #1 Best Technology company.
In addition, the company for the third year in a row, was also recognised with both the Gallup Exceptional Workplace Award and the Don Clifton Strengths-Based Award. It is the only Australian company, and one of just five organisations globally, to receive both awards.
COVID as a stress test
2020 and 2021 took the team out of the office and into a different set of problems, and the awards project stopped. The underlying culture did not reset with it. When the company re-entered off the back of a year together, the result showed the model had held through the interruption and was still compounding.
CliftonStrengths as a translation layer
Gallup’s CliftonStrengths gave the business a second, universal language for the same idea: strong partnerships, clear positioning, and playing to strengths. Everyone could now talk about chemistry, position and energy in the same terms, whether or not they had ever watched a match. Macquarie Cloud Services reports that its engagement scores moved into the top 3% of Gallup’s global benchmark over this period.
Second place, the hardest result to sit with
Finishing 2nd on Australia’s Best Workplaces List in 2023 produced a genuinely mixed reaction inside the company: pride at cracking the top three, and a lick of disappointment at coming that close. Colleagues pointed out, correctly, that the finish was remarkable in its own right. Holding both feelings at once, and letting neither one take over, is what carried the project into 2024.
Building the best team, player by player
Team dynamic comes before individual skill, and that ordering is the least comfortable part of the model to run. A squad with the right chemistry will consistently outperform a group of talented individuals playing for themselves.
In practice it means coaching hard the moment someone drifts from the standard. Most people respond to clear expectations and honest feedback, and get back in step with the team. The company is equally clear about what happens when they do not.
“We invest a lot in coaching our people, and most people rise to it. But not every philosophy suits every player. If someone isn’t aligned to our high-performance mindset or our culture, we help them find another club, and we do it with dignity. Those are the rules of being in this club.”
Tony Pandher · Chief Operating Officer, Macquarie Cloud Services
What has changed for the business and its people?
Business impact
What the culture work changed commercially
- First in the Small category on Australia’s Best Workplaces in Technology 2026, a third consecutive year at the top of that band.
- The graduate program supplies people who already hold the standard, reducing how much the business depends on the external market for cultural fit.
- Employee engagement and customer advocacy were built as one project, with the internal and external measures moving together.
- The wider Macquarie approach to customer and people experience is documented in Joseph Michelli’s book Customer Magic: The Macquarie Way.
People impact
What the culture work changed for employees
- A Youth Academy that develops graduates from entry level and promotes them into the wider business.
- Humble, Hungry and Smart taught from day one, before a new employee has learned any other way of working.
- CliftonStrengths as a shared vocabulary for strengths and positioning across the whole company.
- Home-grown talent promoted together into the core of the business, on the Class of ’92 pattern.
- Exits handled as transfers, with an honest conversation, dignity, and care for where the person lands next.
What can other organisations take from this?
Take away the football and the mechanics still transfer to almost any organisation willing to commit to them over years. These are the building blocks Macquarie Cloud Services used.
| Principle | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Borrow your benchmark from outside your industry | The ambition here came from admiring other leading companies that Macquarie Cloud Services doesn’t compete with and deciding to earn the same reputation. |
| Make the development pipeline carry the culture | A graduate program can develop capability and imprint behavioural standards at the same time, before anyone has learned a different way of working. |
| Grow your own spine | Promoting home-grown people together into the core of the business builds a generation that carries the culture forward without the original architects. |
| Find a translation layer | A strengths framework or shared vocabulary gives people from very different backgrounds one way to talk about teamwork, positioning and blind spots. |
| Set the standard, then coach to it | Be explicit about how every person is expected to show up. Most people rise to clear, honest coaching. Where someone does not, the business has to make a call. |
| Enter before you feel ready | External benchmarking turns a private ambition into a repeatable feedback loop. A poor first result is information you can act on. |
| Expect shocks and plan to survive them | A pandemic or a downturn will interrupt momentum. The test is whether the culture holds through the interruption, not whether the metric climbs every year. |
| Decide in advance how you will respond to winning | The hardest discipline in this story was choosing to stay humble and go again the week after reaching number one, three years running. |
| Secure air cover that outlasts a budget cycle | None of this works without an executive team willing to give one leader genuine latitude across years. |
Macquarie Cloud Services spent seven years building something it believed in before an outside voice pushed it to find out where that belief really stood.
Fourteen years on, the company has spent three consecutive years at the top of its category in the incredibly competitive, globally recognised Best Workplaces in Australia List. The discipline underneath it is repeatable: dream deliberately, measure honestly, treat 19th place and 1st place alike as information, and decide every year to go again.
