June 17, 2025
HR, admins, customer service, EAs, office managers … these corporate support professionals are the backbone of your business. But with tech evolving so rapidly, customer expectations changing and regulatory pressure on the rise, they need support themselves in order to keep your business running smoothly.
So how do you build high-performing corporate support teams that don’t just handle change, but thrive in it? Check out these five tips.
1. Start by defining success
Great people do great things when they understand what is expected of them – when they know what ‘great’ is meant to look like.
Therefore, the first question to ask when building stronger corporate support teams is: What does success look like? And secondly, do your people know that? Try to be specific, for instance:
- What does great customer service look like?
- What is the outcome of a great recruitment process?
- What does a great admin do each day?
Measuring success
Next, identify which KPIs can be used to measure greatness. Give everyone a set of relevant KPIs, tied to the definition of greatness, and explain to them what those KPIs mean. How do they contribute to the broader company mission?
These targets will help tie people’s roles to real business outcomes, then help you measure your progress over time.
2. Ensure you have the right skills in place
Skills requirements in corporate Australia are evolving, and pretty dramatically too. While many legacy practices are still useful, many more are gone completely as new cloud-based tech, process automation and AI disrupt how we do business.
If, during the process of defining success, you realise you lack the skills in-house to meet new targets, there are two steps to take:
First, create opportunities for growth
Ensure that your people have plenty of room to grow – either up (i.e. promotion) or out (i.e. upskilling).
Career progression is one of the top drivers of talent attraction and employee retention that we see here at TalentWeb; people want to know that their job could lead to better opportunities in future. It’s not a nice to have, it’s a must.
Then hire the right people
Still don’t have the skills you need? Time to bring in someone new. That means…
- Offering benefits, not just compensation: People expect more than just a competitive salary. They also want things which offer real value to their lives. For example:
- Extra annual leave
- Above-minimum super guarantees
- Health and wellness incentives (including insurance)
- A winning social culture
- Flexible work policies
- Childcare incentives
- Hunting for passive talent: Passive talent are those candidates who could be open to a new opportunity, but aren’t actively searching – they make up the bulk of the market’s best talent. You won’t find these great corporate support professionals on job boards because they aren’t looking for work. To find them, you must build your networks, develop relationships and attract them out of their existing roles.
- Using an expert recruitment partner for help: Talent hunting in the current market isn’t easy, and building networks takes time – time that corporate support recruitment professionals like the team here at TalentWeb have already put in.
Learn more: Hiring in a skills shortage: How to attract great tech talent
3. Foster a winning company culture
Your company culture has a bigger impact on employee success than you might realise. Just look at what the research says:
- A positive correlation between company culture and employee output suggests happy workers tend to produce better results (Lagos State University).
- Poor workplace culture can negatively impact wellbeing, the bottom line, productivity and employee turnover (Harvard).
- Disengaged employees cost their company the equivalent of 18% of their annual salary each year (Gallup).
Quick tips to improving your company culture
- Start at the top – leaders set the tone, and everyone follows.
- Offer feedback and advice to clarify people’s roles and enable success.
- Give people purpose in their role – let them know how their job is tied to the bigger picture.
- Utilise rewards and recognition to build positivity and celebrate success.
- Gather honest feedback (see below).
4. Gather feedback
You can’t fix what you don’t know is broken. Gathering feedback helps to provide multiple perspectives, enabling you to pinpoint the precise problems affecting your teams, dig to the root cause and put in place a plan of action to repair things.
In this way, gathering feedback not only shows that you care about your people’s opinions, it also gives you the tools to directly fix their issues – a double win for company culture, productivity and employee retention.
Ways to gather feedback among corporate support teams
- Prioritise transparency – really promote that you want honest opinions, no sugar-coating.
- Host 1:1s with each of your team members and ask for their perspective.
- Conduct anonymous online feedback surveys to achieve even better results.
5. Encourage diversity
Inclusivity and diversity get a lot of media attention, but when you cut through the noise you realise that these aren’t just buzzwords – they can have significant benefits to the business.
Check these stats out:
- Diverse leadership is connected to improved innovation (Boston Consulting Group).
- Workers in inclusive teams are 8x more likely to be satisfied in their jobs and 3x less likely to quit (DCA).
- Diverse companies show improved financial outperformance compared to companies with poor diversity (McKinsey).
Put another way, if your company is staffed mainly by very similar groups, you’re vastly underutilising the broader talent pool – and the skills and perspectives available therein.
Quick tips for encouraging diversity in your corporate support teams
- Gather diversity data: Anonymously asking people about their gender, ethnic background, country of origin and educational background builds a picture of your as-is state. What could change?
- Hire for skills: Skills-based hiring shifts your recruitment focus away from personal characteristics and towards specific competency requirements, helping to work around hidden biases.
- Provide flexible work options: This helps to accommodate a more diverse workforce.
- Tackle toxicity: Actively addressing poor workplace cultures creates a safer workspace for all.
- Tie career progression to KPIs: Supporting people based on quantitative measures can help to eliminate bias from training, upskilling and promotion pathways. If it’s objective, it’s transparent.
Pro tip: Struggling to find and address bias? Don’t worry, it’s hard to spot even when you’re specifically hunting for it. Sometimes you need an outside perspective, which is where turning to an expert recruitment partner with expertise across corporate support disciplines can help.
When you need help finding next-level passive talent, give us a call
Our specialist Corporate Support recruiters understand the diverse needs of this market, speak your language and can help you access vast networks of passive talent.
Learn how we help employers here, or contact us to talk about your unique business.
