Case Study: Industrial Services, A People & Culture Team Built a Shared Adaptability Language Before Leading an Enterprise HR Platform Rollout

CASE STUDY  ·  INDUSTRIAL SERVICES

A People & Culture Team Built a Shared Adaptability Language Before Leading an Enterprise HR Platform Rollout

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

AQai® Certified Partner Jay Reid led the 30-person People & Culture team of a multinational services group’s Canadian operation through a multi-tier adaptability program — Executive Debrief, full-team Learning Session, and 1:1 coaching — that built the shared language and cross-team insight needed to position the team as advocates of adaptability ahead of an enterprise HR platform rollout.

About the Client

The client is the Canadian operation of a global services multinational. Operating bilingually in French and English from its Canadian headquarters, with many French-first staff, its People & Culture function supports a multi-functional services workforce across the country.

Situation

Following an earlier engagement with the client’s Senior Leadership Team, the People & Culture team commissioned a programme to position themselves as “advocates of adaptability” ahead of a planned digital transformation: the rollout of a cloud-based enterprise HR platform that would change how every employee experienced HR services.

The 30-person team — spanning Directors (7), HR Leadership (5), Compensation (12), Generalists (5), and Talent Acquisition (5) — operated bilingually, with many members French-first. They had no shared framework for understanding how individuals and sub-teams would respond to a change of this scale, or which adaptive capacities would carry the weight of an HR platform implementation across the wider organisation.

Implication

Enterprise HR platform rollouts succeed or fail on adaptive capacity at the human level — particularly Hope, Unlearning, and Grit — and the People & Culture team itself was the cohort most likely to shape the rollout’s success across the wider organisation. Without visibility into where the team’s adaptive strengths and gaps actually sat, the company risked positioning its most influential internal champions on uneven ground.

Approach

Assessment Design

All 30 People & Culture team members completed the AQ® Assessment, generating individual AQme® profiles, a department-level AQteam® report, and five sub-team reports (Directors, HR Leadership, Compensation, Generalists, Talent Acquisition). To respect the team’s bilingual reality, communications were developed and translated by The Making Box rather than relying on automated platform invitations. Many staff completed the assessment in French.

Engagement Structure

The engagement unfolded across three phases. First, Directors took part in a 60-minute Executive Debrief that surfaced initial AQ team results and analysis. The following week, the full P&C team participated in a 2.5-hour interactive online “AQ Learning and Debrief Session” introducing the AQ® framework, exploring the team’s data, and giving participants language to apply to their own profiles. To ground the learning, five randomly selected staff then took part in 1:1 60-minute coaching sessions.

Tailoring & Integration

The analysis went further than a typical team report. Jay built five sub-team comparisons against AQai’s global average and a tenure-based segmentation contrasting 0–2-year and 2+-year staff. Using a “Strong Four / Be Aware Two” methodology — drawn from AQai’s Coach Only Report — he identified the four highest-scoring Ability and Environment sub-dimensions and the two lowest for each sub-team.

He then cross-mapped these findings to five organisational priorities the client had named: HR Platform Implementation, Personal Development, Sustainable + Flexible Workforces, Talent Development + Succession, and Engagement + Equity, Inclusion & Safety. The resulting matrix linked each priority to its three most influential AQ® sub-dimensions, giving the client a single page that translated assessment data into actionable focus areas.

What AQ® Reveals

AQ® — the Adaptability Quotient — measures the human capacity to navigate change, complexity, and uncertainty. It is the only validated framework built specifically for the conditions modern organisations operate in.

Where engagement surveys capture how people feel at a single moment, and personality assessments describe who someone is, AQ® measures something different: what people can actually do when conditions shift. It assesses adaptability across three dimensions — Ability (the skills people use to respond to change), Character (how they show up under pressure), and Environment (the conditions around them that enable or block adaptation).

Leaders use the resulting data to predict who will thrive through change, target development where it will move the needle, and measure whether the organisation is genuinely getting more adaptable over time.

Results

Primary Outcome

The People & Culture team left the engagement with what they had come for: a shared adaptability language and a clear, data-backed view of where to focus to support the platform rollout. The HR Platform Implementation priority was specifically tied to three sub-dimensions — Hope (63% of the team scored hopeful, none in the fearful band), Unlearning (the team’s second-lowest Ability average, with 40% in the medium band), and Grit (the team’s strongest Ability). Jay’s analysis told leaders exactly which lever to pull next.

Supporting Outcomes

Mental Flexibility was identified as universally low across all five sub-teams — the only sub-dimension below the AQai global average — and emerged as the single highest-leverage development target across multiple priorities, including Personal Development and Sustainable Workforces. Participant survey data captured an immediate behavioural shift: average mood rose from 4.00 to 4.57 across the session, group connectedness from 4.20 to 4.61, and participants rated the experience 4.7/5 for fun. Seventy percent of participants requested 1:1 coaching follow-up.

Forward Momentum

The engagement also surfaced a product feedback item that the client’s bilingual context made unavoidable: French-first staff completed the assessment in French but received their results in English. Jay flagged this for AQai® product team attention, and the engagement closed with concrete recommendations on cohort sizing, awareness-versus-development session sequencing, and language localisation that have shaped subsequent partner engagements.

Practitioner Spotlight

LED BY

The Making Box

Jay Reid  ·  Co-founder, The Making Box

The Making Box is a Canadian creative learning organisation that designs and delivers experiential team development through the lens of improvisation, play, and adaptive thinking. Working with corporate teams across North America, the firm specialises in unlocking team adaptability through structured experiential learning that pairs scientific rigour with creative engagement. Jay Reid is one of AQai’s earliest Certified Partners and co-leads the firm’s applied work with leadership teams.

themakingbox.ca  ·  View profile in the AQai® Partner Directory →

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