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Tech consulting is a tough industry to build a people-first culture. Consultants rotate across clients, work in distributed pods, and rarely sit in a single office for long. Natasha Thomas, Manager of People and Culture at Curate Partners, brings more than a decade of IT-industry experience to the discipline of building culture in exactly that environment. Her conversation on Reimagining Company Culture is the working version of how to build belonging when the workforce is rarely in the same room.
Natasha's argument is that people-first culture is not about being soft. It is about being deliberate. The companies that have built durable cultures in tech consulting are the ones that designed the rituals, the rhythms, and the support structures intentionally. The ones that hoped culture would emerge from talented people working hard usually produce churn instead.
Building a Sense of Belonging in a Distributed Workforce
Belonging is harder in distributed work. The hallway conversations that build rapport in offices do not exist. The shared meals do not happen. The sense of being part of something larger has to be built through deliberate design.
Deloitte research on workplace trust found that belonging is one of the two greatest needs in modern organizations and that working remotely for long stretches can produce alienation. The design problem is to enable distributed work while preserving belonging.
Designing Moments of Connection on Purpose
Natasha's framing of "moments of connection" is precise. They are not random; they are designed. Onboarding rituals, peer mentoring, project-launch rhythms, and internal-recognition cadences. Each is a designed moment that produces a piece of the felt sense of belonging.
The infrastructure has to support the moments. Team-building rituals done well produce connection. Employee engagement programs done well are the cumulative effect of designed moments rather than one-off events.
What Are the Most Underrated Moments of Connection?
The first 1:1 with a new manager. The post-project retrospective. The peer-recognition shoutout. The exit conversation that captures real learning. None of those is dramatic. All of them are unevenly applied across companies.
How Do You Tell If Belonging Is Working in a Distributed Team?
Survey questions specifically about belonging. Retention by demographic. Internal mobility data. Qualitative comments on engagement surveys. Companies that measure only top-line engagement miss belonging because the question is too narrow.
Supporting People of All Backgrounds in Career Ambition
Natasha's commitment to building programs that support people of all backgrounds in achieving career ambitions shows up in the structural work. Documented career ladders. Sponsorship goals tied to manager performance. Training cohorts that include peer coaching across demographic lines.
The structural work compounds. Talent management done well produces advancement that mirrors the workforce. Done badly, it produces representation at hire that decays through differential attrition.
What Actually Works for People-First Tech Consulting
Build Predictable Connection Rituals
Predictable rituals beat heroic events. Quarterly all-hands with consistent agendas. Monthly peer-mentoring sessions. Weekly stand-ups that include recognition. The cumulative weight of small consistent rituals beats the occasional offsite.
Train Managers on Distributed Leadership
Managers running distributed teams need different skills than managers running collocated teams. The training has to acknowledge the difference. The companies that train explicitly produce different outcomes than the ones that import office-based training.
Use Anonymous Channels for Distributed Reporting
Distributed workforces make it harder to surface issues. Anonymous reporting matters more, not less, in this context.
Where Employee Relations Fits
ER is the function that catches the failures distributed culture cannot prevent. A purpose-built case management platform handles the cases without forcing the team to choose between speed and care.
How AI Helps Distributed People Functions
Vera, the AllVoices AI co-pilot, drafts case responses, summarizes histories, and surfaces patterns. The judgment stays with the ER specialist. The drudge work moves to the AI.
Frequently Asked Questions About People-First Culture
How do you build culture in a distributed workforce?
Through deliberate ritual design. Onboarding, recognition, retrospectives, and exits all matter more in distributed work because the informal connections of office life are missing.
What kills culture fastest in a tech consulting company?
Project pressure overriding people priorities. Burnout produced by uneven workload. Promotion patterns that do not reflect the workforce.
Should consulting firms have ERGs?
Yes, with adaptation for the distributed context. Virtual ERGs work; they require explicit design and consistent funding.
How do you measure people-first commitment without it sounding performative?
Use outcome metrics: retention, internal mobility, career advancement, ER pattern data. The metrics tell the story; the announcements do not.
What is the role of HR in moments of connection?
HR designs the structural moments and trains managers to run the daily ones. Both layers have to function for the connection to be felt.
How Curate Partners Designs Connection Across Project Rotations
Curate's project-rotation environment produces specific design challenges. Consultants who rotate quarterly miss the rhythms that build belonging in stable teams. Natasha's adaptation is to design moments of connection that travel with the consultant: cross-project mentoring relationships, internal recognition that crosses project lines, and onboarding rituals that build the connection independent of the current project assignment.
The pattern travels well to other rotation-heavy industries. Healthcare systems with shift rotations, manufacturing operations with seasonal variation, and global retailers with location moves all benefit from connection rituals that survive structural change. The design principles are consistent; the execution adapts to context. Team-building rituals done deliberately are the operational layer that produces belonging in environments where it would otherwise erode.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Natasha's framing of culture as designed moments is the right altitude. Distributed and consulting workforces produce more cultural failure than collocated workforces, and the failure is not inevitable. Companies that design the rituals deliberately produce different retention numbers.
Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report continues to show that engagement is highly variable across organizations, and the variance often tracks the operational discipline of the people function. Designed moments of connection are exactly that kind of discipline.
The IT-industry context also produces particular lessons about manager development. Project rotations mean that consultants often work for different managers across quarters. The companies that have built durable cultures invest in manager-cohort training that produces consistent leadership across the rotation, rather than relying on individual manager quality. People team efficiency in this environment depends heavily on the operational consistency of the manager bench.
The reporting infrastructure also matters more in distributed contexts. Issues that would surface naturally in a collocated team can stay hidden across project boundaries. Anonymous reporting backed up by responsive ER capacity produces the safety net that distributed work otherwise lacks.
The compounding effect of these operational disciplines shows up in the data over multi-year horizons. Companies that have built the infrastructure tend to see improving retention, faster issue resolution, and steadier engagement scores year over year. The investment is operational rather than dramatic, but the cumulative outcome is significant for any people team measuring real business impact.
The pattern holds across mid-market and enterprise contexts. Mid-market companies that adopt the operational disciplines early build a structural advantage that scales with them. Enterprise companies that retrofit the disciplines into existing operating models see the benefits more slowly but consistently. Either way, the work is operational rather than aspirational, and the leaders who treat it that way produce the outcomes the strategy promised.
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