The HR Leader in conversation with AVL Wines director, Tash Cahill

Tash Cahill, people and culture director at AVL Wines, joined The HR Leader to discuss how psychology relates to her role, how she helped shape her current position, and how she’s achieving success.

Shandel McAuliffe, editor at HR Leader: “How does psychology relate to your role?”

Ms Cahill: “I was really interested in what makes people tick, what motivates people. So, I was weighing up, ‘Do I go and do a psychology degree?’ But I wasn't as interested in the statistics and the science side of it. [I was interested in] the people side of things and being able to help people and understand what makes them tick.”

“I've definitely brought that into my role today. We’re really passionate about driving an inclusive culture and supporting people through all aspects of their life, building resilience, supporting managers, supporting leaders. So, I was definitely passionate about that from quite an early start in my career,” she explained.

Editor: “How have you helped shape your current role?”

Ms Cahill: “The main factor in shaping my current role at AVL has definitely been building a people strategy up from nothing.
“We didn't have a people strategy, so the key focus has been aligning a people strategy to our business goals, but also genuinely listening to our people and putting our people at the heart of all our decisions.”

Editor: “How have you achieved this?”

Ms Cahill: “By gaining feedback and giving our employees a voice, which we've done through employee engagement surveys. So that's been a real consistent for us and that's helped us to drive results, and drive our amazing employee engagement results, currently it's 70 per cent, which is top quartile.”

She continued: “Having data insights when you're a commercial business around what people are saying and what people think and feel, really helps. Culture for us is not the bean bags, the beer fridge, and the ping pong table. That’s all nice, and having a beautiful work environment is really important, but for us, it’s really about building that foundation, listening to our people and driving results through that and being able to go back to our employees and say, ‘This is the feedback that you gave us, and this is what we're doing about it, and this is how it fits into our people strategy.’”

“It was about getting the basics right first. So, all the hygiene factors, fair pay, performance management. That includes a behavioural framework. So, people are doing their work but also behaving in the right way. Having benefits that support people throughout the whole of their life, not at just a point in time. Flexible working. All those kinds of things were the foundations for us, and once we got foundations and the basics right, we've really been able to build on that to build an inclusive culture,” said Ms Cahill.

The transcript of this podcast episode, when quoted above, was slightly edited for publishing purposes. The full conversation with Tash Cahill is below.