When NDIS reform required Aruma’s 5,000-strong workforce to fundamentally shift how they thought about care and cost, more training was not the answer. A six-month co-design engagement, 26 workshops, and two years later: culture had shifted and employee engagement had held through major restructures.
This engagement began under a predecessor business and continued directly under SHiFT with Purpose, when Aruma sought out the same designer two years later.
When the NDIS moved Australia’s disability sector from block funding to individual plans, it changed more than the funding model. It changed the fundamental relationship between providers, participants, and money.
For an organisation of Aruma’s size, the implications were significant. Staff who had built careers in a sector where government funding flowed broadly to the organisation now needed to think differently: about individual plans, about the limits within each one, about how to deliver excellent, person-centred care within the financial reality of what a participant’s plan actually contained.
Training had been tried. Information had been shared. The understanding was there, at a cognitive level. But understanding something and living it differently every day are not the same thing; and the gap between them was widening.
Aruma Disability Services
aruma.com.au →Scale note: This methodology works at 5,000+ staff. It is not reserved for large organisations; but it scales to them without losing the human-centred approach.
The first engagement designed the culture shift. The second confirmed it had compounded; and deepened it at the leadership level.
Phase 1; 2021–2022 (approx.)
Over six months, more than twenty-six workshops were facilitated across Aruma’s teams, levels, and locations; online, and designed so that every person who wanted to contribute could. Support workers. Team leaders. Regional managers. People at every level navigating this transition in their own way, with their own pressures and questions.
Every workshop was productive in the way that matters: participants left feeling heard, having shared their real experience, and having contributed directly to what came next. Not a single session felt like a waste of time.
From those twenty-six conversations, a detailed culture strategy and implementation plan was co-designed; not a framework borrowed from another organisation, but one built from the actual patterns, pressures, and possibilities that had surfaced across the workforce. Custom tools were developed for the implementation team to carry the work forward independently.
Phase 2; Two years later
Two years after the first engagement ended, a message arrived. The culture had shifted. The work had compounded. But Aruma was now moving through significant transformation and restructuring, and the leadership team needed to make faster decisions without losing the cohesion they had built.
Every member of the executive leadership team was spoken with individually before the workshop. Including the CEO, who confirmed something unexpected: major restructures had happened. Employee engagement had been surveyed. The expected dip had not arrived.
A three-hour workshop was facilitated with the full executive leadership team. Through it, a custom decision-making tool was co-designed: one that accounted for the people in that specific room; those who needed detail, those who worked from the big picture, those who needed to move and move now. Not a generic framework. A tool built for the actual humans sitting around that table, signed by each of them, and adopted into how they work.
“If you ever need a referral from a client, you’ve got us. We have numbers that show the strategy you designed worked. We did a huge transformation and several restructures; and I was expecting employee engagement to drop in the surveys. That did not happen.”
A message. A phone call. And a sentence that does not arrive often in this kind of work: “We changed the culture. It worked.”
The CEO put it plainly: a major transformation had happened, along with several restructures; the kind of operational disruption that reliably shows up as a dip in staff engagement surveys. It did not. Not a single dip. The strategy had worked, but so had the way the journey was designed: people had felt part of it, so when the organisation changed around them, they had not disengaged from it.
That is what it looks like when culture change actually compounds.
Not a one-time initiative. Not a training program. A co-designed shift, built by the people who had to live it; and measured two years later in the numbers that matter most.
“If you ever need a referral from a client, you’ve got us. We have numbers that show the strategy you designed worked. We did a huge transformation and several restructures; and I was expecting employee engagement to drop in the surveys. That did not happen. The strategy worked. And the journey was so well designed that we did not have a single dip in our engagement.”
Every NDIS provider in Australia is navigating some version of what Aruma was facing when this work began. The funding model changed. The compliance requirements changed. The expectations changed. And the instinct, almost universally, is to respond with information: training sessions, policy updates, cascaded communications, new processes to follow.
Information is not culture change. People can understand something completely and still not live it differently. The gap between knowing and doing is not a knowledge problem. It is a design problem.
What this engagement did differently was start with the people; not with the answer that leadership had already decided on, but with the actual experience of the workforce navigating the transition in real time. Twenty-six workshops did not deliver a message. They surfaced one. And because the people doing the work had helped shape the strategy, they did not need to be convinced to implement it. They already owned it.
This is what experience design applied to culture looks like. It is the same discipline whether you are designing a participant intake journey, a service model, or a cultural shift for five thousand staff. You start with the humans. You understand their real experience. You design from there. And you stay long enough to make sure it compounds.
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