Sharon Gray's kids made the call. She'd come home with two job offers, laid them both out on the kitchen table, and asked what she should do. The answer was immediate. "Oz Harvest is cooler," they said.
She laughs telling the story. "So that was really what prompted me."
It was February 2020. Two weeks before COVID shut everything down. Sharon had just been hand-picked by OzHarvest founder Ronni Kahn to lead the people function at Australia's most recognised food rescue charity. She walked into a workforce of 130 staff plus thousands of volunteers, a mission she believed in deeply, and a pandemic nobody saw coming. Six years later, that workforce has grown past 400 staff and 3,000 volunteers, the organisation holds AFR Best Places to Work and SEEK Employer of Choice recognition, and Sharon has been named in the HR Influence Awards 2026 Top 12 for building purpose-led people frameworks that others across the not-for-profit sector now reference as best practice.
Sharon didn't start in HR. Her career ran through operations, then people management, then human resources across medical, pharmaceutical and hospitality sectors before she moved into not-for-profit. She spent time in children's disability services, where she found a pull toward work that made a tangible difference. But the path wasn't planned.
"Sometimes I really wonder whether it's by design or by luck," she says. "And I think it really is a bit of both."
That operations background, though, turned out to be the making of her as a people leader. It gave her something that pure HR career paths sometimes miss: an understanding that the people on the other side of the table have their own priorities, and that HR is rarely the most pressing thing on their list.
"Understanding that HR things may not be primary or central to their day's work, and being able to handle that in a realistic and practical way, I think has helped me do my job well," she says.
It's a perspective that runs through everything she does at OzHarvest. She doesn't approach people strategy as a theoretical exercise. She approaches it as someone who has sat in the operational chair and knows what it feels like when a well-meaning HR initiative lands at the wrong time.
When the topic of culture comes up, Sharon pushes back on the idea that it's something only abstract or academic. She's direct about it.
"I don't think culture is academic. Culture is everything. It's around you. It's how you feel. It's your experience and how you experience the place in which you work."
Then she lands on a line that sticks: "Culture is the sum of all the micro decisions that you make every day. Everything that you do represents the culture that you want to be developing."
At OzHarvest, her job was never to build the culture from scratch. The culture was already there when she arrived, shaped by Ronni Kahn's founding energy and the mission itself. Sharon's job was to protect it, especially through a period of significant change as the organisation moved from founder-led to a new CEO.
"My job wasn't to build something great," she says. "It's to maintain and nurture and protect that culture."
She goes further on the relationship between culture and business strategy, and her position is clear. "I actually say that the culture doesn't need to align with the strategy. The culture is part of the strategy. You don't create a strategy without consideration of the culture."
At OzHarvest, culture sits inside the strategic plan. It's a line item, not an afterthought. "How beautiful is it that we give 400 employees and 3,000 volunteers the opportunity to have a great work experience every day," she says. "I would say that the strategy has to include the culture."
OzHarvest manages one of the most diverse workforces in the Australian not-for-profit sector. Drivers, warehouse staff, corporate teams, graduates, and thousands of volunteers. Creating a single, cohesive culture across that mix could easily fragment. Sharon's answer is purpose, repeated daily.
"We talk about our purpose every single day. We talk about our values every single day. We recruit to our values."
She uses the drivers as an example. OzHarvest has 187 of them, out in vans across the country rescuing food. A clean driving record matters, she says, but it's not the reason they get hired.
"We don't call them drivers. They're ambassadors. The key reason is that they connect with our values, they are aligned with our purpose, they're getting out of bed every day to make a difference and loving what they do."
The results back it up. OzHarvest's most recent staff survey showed 93% of employees feel incredibly connected to the organisation's purpose, with the remainder reporting high connection. Those numbers don't come from a poster on the wall. They come from the hiring process.
Which brings us to Sharon's most quoted rule.
"We've been very firm on the protection of our culture through our hiring managers," Sharon says. "And we simplify it with this: if it is not a hell yes, it is a hell no."
She means it literally. Every hiring manager in the business uses those words. If a candidate looks good on paper but something feels off, the answer is no. No second-guessing, no convincing yourself it'll work out.
"Recruitment as we know is a combination of science and art," she says. "If you're not feeling it, even if everything great is on paper, if you're feeling that there is something not quite right, well listen to your gut. It's gotta be 100% hell yes."
She knows the rule works because she broke it once, and it went badly.
"I did make a bad hire and I made it into my own team," she says. "It was very visible that the head of people and culture recruited the wrong person."
She didn't hide it. She shared the story across the organisation. The mistake, she says, was ignoring her own gut because she was eager to fill the role. "I went against my rule, which is if it's not a hell yes, it's a hell no."
What she did next says a lot about the psychological safety she's built at OzHarvest. She turned the failure into a public learning moment. "Other people could see from me that even though I'm the head of people and culture, I'm allowed to make a mistake. I'm allowed to learn from that mistake."
OzHarvest surveys psychological safety twice a year. More than 85% of staff score the organisation as extremely psychologically safe. "It doesn't happen by accident," Sharon says. "We work very hard at that."
One of Sharon's signature pieces of work is the volunteer-to-paid pipeline. OzHarvest has around 3,000 active volunteers, and they're a deliberately open pathway into paid employment.
"It happens quite organically," she says, though the systems behind it are increasingly deliberate. The team recently completed an 18-month implementation of a new platform to make volunteer registration simple and app-based. "That's something they told us over the years, and so that's what we've delivered on."
The volunteer base itself is broad. Retirees wanting to give back. People wanting to stay connected after leaving work. International students looking for community in a new city. Friendship groups who now go on holidays together. And people who join with an eye on eventually moving into paid roles.
"We're very committed that any position that becomes available, whether it is created or we need it, is advertised internally to our people and our volunteers first," Sharon says. "We have 3,000 fabulous volunteers, so we advertise with them first. And then if we don't have anybody who is interested or best fit for the role, we go to market."
It's HR operating as an opportunity centre rather than a cost centre, a pattern the HR Influence Awards judges noted across several finalists this year.
Sharon built what she calls a purpose activation approach at OzHarvest. Every staff member can take a "purpose day" once a year, spending a full day working in a different department to see firsthand the impact that team has.
"Last week we had somebody from finance who was interested in joining P&C for the day to see what we do," she says. "She said she was also now aware of everything that we had to do and deal with every day. She had to use her brain differently that day, which was really interesting."
Sharon herself had her own purpose day booked. She was planning to sit with the food rescue coordinators, the people behind the scenes who manage the logistics of 100 vans picking up and dropping off food across the country.
"To me it seems like a dance where they're making sure you go out empty, you come back empty, and you've rescued a thousand kilos of food and distributed it to where it needs to be. It's quite the orchestra."
For people leaders in corporate settings who want to be more purpose-driven, Sharon has practical advice. Use the five whys. Keep asking why your organisation exists until you get past the surface answers.
"I know some of it might seem like it's about making money, but that's not the only reason they exist," she says. "Asking five whys about why you're here should certainly surface that it's not just about making money. That's just an outcome of what you do. What you really do is support people to make better decisions or help people live the life they want to be living."
Sharon is honest about the tension between transactional and strategic HR. Even at OzHarvest, she says, there are still people who see the people function as the team that answers questions and fills roles. She doesn't resent it. She uses it.
"My advice to my team is that while we do want to do more strategic work, the transactional work is really important because you are building relationships, trust, value and credibility when you do that work with your leaders."
Her approach is to earn the right to be strategic by being excellent at the operational basics first. Once leaders trust your competence on the day-to-day, you can start asking different questions. "What is your strategy on a page for the year? What are your goals for your people? What do you want to see them doing? How do you want this team to feel at the end of the year?"
"Asking those forward-thinking questions really positions us in a way that makes us hopefully a valuable part of the team," she says.
She also introduced the HBDI (Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument) at OzHarvest, giving the organisation a shared language for understanding how people think and communicate. "People understand what type of brain they're dealing with, and they look out for different brain types when putting a working group together so that you've got that diversity of thinking."
When asked what advice she'd give her younger self, Sharon pauses.
"I'm a late-in-life listener," she says. "I should have been an early-in-life listener. But I did start my career last century where you didn't collaborate so much. It was more command and control."
Her second piece of advice is one she clearly wishes more people in HR would hear. "Be kinder to yourself. This job is really hard sometimes and we wear many hats. People think we're financial advisors, counsellors, advisors of all types. Be able to have some boundaries and be kind to yourself around the work that you do. And always stop and celebrate what you've done."
She says the team films every first job offer a new P&C team member makes, because the moment matters. "You are changing someone's life when you do that. The work we do ripples through everything for people."
It's a fitting line from someone who chose a career path built on the belief that how people experience their work is worth protecting. Sharon Gray didn't set out to become a Chief People Officer. She ended up here because her kids thought it was cooler, because a founder saw something in her, and because she trusted her gut. Most of the time, anyway.
Sharon Gray is Chief People Officer at OzHarvest, Sydney. She is a 2026 HR Influence Awards Top 12 ANZ, with employer brand recognition across AFR Best Places to Work (NFP), SEEK Employer of Choice (NFP), and HRD 5-Star Employer. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
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The HR Influence Awards 2026 Top 12 ANZ are presented by Compono.
Full details at hrinfluenceawards.com.au.