Chief People Officer at Splash, Liz Hall - Defining an Intentional & High-Performance Culture

On this episode of Reimagining Company Culture, we sat down with Liz Hall, Chief People Officer at Splash and a founding member of CPOHQ. Splash is a next-generation event marketing platform, and Liz oversees recruiting, learning and development, total rewards, DEI, performance management, and the rest of what most people would call the full HR stack. Her core conviction is that culture only stays high-performing if it is designed on purpose.

The conversation traced what intentional culture actually looks like, why onboarding is the most underrated culture lever, and how People teams can keep culture consistent as the company grows past the point where leaders can know everyone's name. Liz was sharp on a point that often gets glossed over: empathy is not the opposite of high performance, it is the operating condition that makes high performance sustainable.

Why Intentional Cultures Outperform Accidental Ones

Most company cultures form by accident. The first dozen hires set unspoken norms, and those norms get amplified as the company grows. By the time someone notices, the culture is whatever the loudest five people decided it was when nobody was paying attention. Intentional cultures are the result of someone, usually a Chief People Officer, deciding to interrupt that drift and design the system explicitly.

The data on engagement makes the case bluntly. According to recent Gallup reporting on the decline in U.S. engagement, the gap between top-quartile and bottom-quartile teams is the difference between a high-performing business and a treadmill. Liz's argument is that the gap is closable, but only with intentional design that holds up under scale.

Building this kind of company culture requires a People team that can see the system, not just the symptoms. Onboarding, performance, manager rituals, and feedback loops all need to point in the same direction. When they do, the culture sustains itself even as the team triples in size.

Why Onboarding Is the Most Underrated Culture Lever

What does intentional onboarding look like?

It looks like a structured ninety-day plan that names the cultural norms explicitly. New hires meet specific people on specific days, not just whoever is around. They get pre-loaded with the language the company uses internally. They see how feedback is given and received in their first week, not their first quarter. Liz's view is that the first thirty days set patterns that take five years to undo.

How does onboarding connect to retention?

Directly. The strongest predictor of first-year retention is the experience of the first ninety days. Companies that invest in onboarding as a culture program rather than a paperwork checklist see meaningful retention gains, especially among employees from underrepresented groups who often have less margin to give a new employer the benefit of the doubt.

What Actually Works When Designing Intentional Culture

Name the norms out loud

Most companies have unwritten rules about who speaks first in meetings, how disagreement is handled, and what good performance looks like. Intentional cultures write those rules down and challenge them in the open. The act of writing them is itself a culture intervention.

Build manager rituals that reinforce the design

One-on-ones with consistent structure, skip-levels with real follow-through, and team retros that surface the messy stuff are how managers translate culture from a deck into a daily experience. None of these rituals are exotic. They are just done consistently.

Use feedback systems to catch drift early

Pulse surveys, anonymous channels, and a real employee survey tool let People teams see culture drift before it becomes a retention crisis. Liz's team treats those signals as forecast data, not historical reporting.

Where Employee Relations Fits in Intentional Cultures

An intentional culture is one that holds up under pressure. Pressure tests culture every time a hard case lands on someone's desk: a harassment claim, a manager who is under-performing, a team that is openly conflicting. The way those moments are handled either reinforces the design or quietly breaks it.

That is why an investment in HR case management belongs inside the culture conversation. The platform is what protects the design when the system gets stressed. The same logic shows up in SHRM's Global Workplace Culture Report, which finds that culture maturity correlates with the operational habits, not the slogans.

How do ER teams support intentional culture?

By giving leaders a faithful mirror. Pattern data from a centralized case system shows where the culture design is working and where it is leaking. Liz's view is that you cannot fix what you cannot see, and ER data is one of the clearest views available.

Frequently Asked Questions About Intentional High-Performance Culture

What is the difference between intentional and high-performance culture?

Intentional describes the design process. High-performance describes the outcome. The two are linked because high-performance cultures are almost never accidental. They are the result of explicit choices about how the company hires, manages, and develops its people.

Can intentional culture survive rapid growth?

Yes, but only if onboarding scales with the headcount and managers are equipped to carry the design. Without those two, scale dilutes the culture inside two or three quarters.

What is the role of empathy in high-performance cultures?

It is the foundation. Empathetic leaders catch issues earlier, hold higher standards with less drama, and make hard decisions without burning trust. The performance follows from the empathy, not the other way around.

How do you measure intentional culture?

Track employee engagement alongside operational metrics like promotion velocity, internal mobility, and case volume by team. Pair the numbers with qualitative themes from open-ended survey feedback. The picture comes into focus quickly.

What is the biggest mistake CPOs make here?

Treating culture as a campaign instead of an operating system. Campaigns end. Operating systems persist. The companies that confuse the two run a lot of culture initiatives without changing how the company actually works.

The Bottom Line for HR Leaders

Liz Hall's work at Splash is a study in what an intentional culture looks like when it has a Chief People Officer who treats culture as engineering. The design is explicit. The rituals are consistent. The feedback systems run on a schedule that does not depend on heroics.

For HR leaders trying to build something similar, the practical move is to start with onboarding and manager rituals. Audit how new hires experience the first ninety days. Audit how managers run their one-on-ones. Pair both audits with feedback signal that you actually look at every month. Repeat for ten quarters and the culture starts to hold even under the kind of pressure that breaks accidental cultures wide open.

The other piece Liz emphasized is the connection between intentional culture and recruiting. Candidates feel the difference in the interview loop. When the panel members can articulate the specific behaviors the company rewards and punishes, candidates either self-select in or self-select out, and both outcomes are good for the team. Hiring becomes a culture-strengthening activity instead of a culture-diluting one. That is the version of recruiting Liz keeps trying to build wherever she lands.

For mid-market and enterprise teams, the same logic applies at promotion time. Promotions are a louder culture signal than any all-hands speech. The criteria the company uses to promote managers tells every employee exactly what is rewarded, regardless of what the company says it values.

See how AllVoices supports the operational backbone of an intentional culture.