July 02, 2026
Building an Award-Winning Culture from Day One: Lessons From Jane Austin at Wave Utilities on EX Lore Podcast
For most HR and EX leaders, the question of what they’d do if given the chance to shape a culture from day one remains just that – a question. For Jane Austin at Wave Utilities, it was reality.
When the UK water retail market deregulated on 1 April 2017, Wave Utilities launched with 70 employees, no name, no building, and no HR policies. Jane Austin, Director of People & Social Value at the water retailer, was there from the start. Alongside CEO Lucy Darch, Jane helped shape an award-winning culture from the ground up, and learned a great deal along the way.
EX Lore – a new podcast from CXM – explores what it takes to build a better employee experience. In our first episode, Jane tells the story of that founding journey at Wave. She reflects on how the culture conversations she had in those first weeks still define Wave nine years later, and why employee voice and psychological safety sit at the heart of everything the organisation does.
Watch the full episode below or on Spotify.
The Conversation That Set the Tone
Before Wave had a name, Jane and Lucy sat down in a meeting room at Northumbrian Water’s headquarters and did something deceptively simple: they shared stories. What had they loved in their careers? What had frustrated them? What kind of company did they want to build?
“It was unintentional,” Jane recalls, “but what we fell into was talking about the things that we’d loved in our career and the things that we really hadn’t enjoyed. Two different career stories, but they had the same themes.”
Those themes – trust, freedom, genuine wellbeing, and a refusal to tick boxes – became the foundation Wave still operates from today.
Budget Constraints as a Design Advantage
One of the most striking threads in this episode is Jane’s reflection on what it meant to build without an established infrastructure to fall back on. Wave had no ready-made pension scheme, no occupational health provider, and no off-the-shelf survey platform.
Rather than replicate what large corporates do by default, she was forced to question everything. And the results, she argues, were often better for it. A creative solution to the occupational health challenge gave Wave access to early intervention mental health support within 24–48 hours, outperforming expensive schemes she had worked with at previous employers.
“When you take nothing for granted and you go back to basics,” she says, “you are actually so much more creative.”
The Living Library
Perhaps the most powerful example of Wave’s culture in action is its Living Library – an initiative born from an employee suggestion in the health, safety and wellbeing forum. It is also, perhaps, part of the reason Wave took home the Best Company Culture award at last year’s UK Employee Experience Awards. Colleagues volunteer to become ‘human books’, writing about something they have lived through – from ADHD to bereavement to domestic abuse – so that others facing similar experiences can reach out.
Wave now has nearly 40 contributors, listed A to Z on the company intranet. Jane describes a team leader who chose to share her story of overcoming a drug addiction. “She said: I feel completely okay. This is Wave. And at that point, you know you’ve cracked the culture.”
The Lesson on Change
Jane’s closing reflection on change management is worth the listen alone. Too many leaders make the mistake of communicating only to those who are already on board. Communicate instead to the most scared, the most resistant, the least confident. Win them over, and everyone else follows.
This is a taste of a candid, wide-ranging conversation. Listen to the full episode above to hear more on Wave’s approach to employee surveys, the challenge of developing people managers in a smaller organisation, and how to make limited budgets work harder.
EX Lore is CXM’s podcast series for people leaders, exploring the real stories behind better employee experience. Subscribe and follow on Spotify and YouTube.
