ANZ Organisations Losing Millions Annually Due to Workforce Culture and Capability Gaps, Cornerstone Report Finds
Cornerstone research, validated by Great Place To Work Australia and New Zealand, reveals a critical disconnect between how leaders perceive their workforce and how employees experience it
SYDNEY, Australia – May 21, 2026 – Cornerstone OnDemand Inc., a global leader in workforce readiness solutions, today announced new research showing that organisations across Australia and New Zealand are losing millions annually due to preventable workforce capability gaps linked to culture.
The report, validated by and featuring expert insights from Great Place To Work Australia & New Zealand, finds that for every 1,000 employees, the cost of unaddressed culture and capability failures reaches AUD $1.64 million in Australia and NZD $1.33 million in New Zealand. Notably, around 85% of these costs stem from employee retention issues and absenteeism rather than hiring inefficiency, highlighting that the greatest workforce risks lie within existing teams, not in recruitment budgets.
The report, The Hidden Number: The Economic Value of Culture and Capability, exposes a persistent and measurable disconnect between how leaders assess their organisations and how employees actually experience them.
Across all six capability pillars measured by the index, ANZ HR leaders rate workforce capability significantly higher than employees, suggesting a disconnect that researchers warn could be distorting strategic decisions on AI investment, restructures and hiring.
Among the report’s key findings:
- ANZ leaders rate workforce culture capability at 80.5 out of 100, while employees rate it 65.6, a 14.9-point gap that signals a drift between leadership perception and employee experience.
- 96% of HR leaders report confidence in their organisation's AI readiness, yet fewer than half of employees agree.
- Around 85% of the economic cost tied to capability gaps comes from retention and absenteeism rather than hiring inefficiency.
- Gen X scores significantly lower than Millennials and Gen Z across critical capability areas, despite carrying much of the responsibility for executing change.
- Capability gaps widen in larger enterprises, where scale deepens disconnects in leadership credibility, internal mobility and workforce change support.
The AI readiness disconnect mirrors findings from a separate Cornerstone study released this week, polling 2,000 employees across the United States and United Kingdom about how well their organisations are supporting AI preparedness. In the survey, 46% reported using AI tools at work without any formal training from their employer, and 65% were building AI skills independently outside of work hours to remain competitive.
"For years, organisations have measured revenue, cost and productivity without measuring the workforce conditions that determine whether those outcomes improve. This report makes visible what has historically remained hidden: the economic cost of capability gaps," said Brenton Smith, Vice President, Asia-Pacific & Japan at Cornerstone OnDemand.
"What should concern CEOs and CFOs is that most of this value leakage is not coming from hiring inefficiency. It is coming from preventable attrition, absenteeism and low confidence in AI-driven change. In ANZ, workforce capability is now a board-level performance lever."
Rebecca Moulynox, General Manager at Great Place To Work Australia & New Zealand, said: "The findings strongly align with what we continue to see across Australia and New Zealand's best workplaces. Where trust, psychological safety and career visibility are strong, retention and productivity outcomes materially outperform the market. The leadership challenge is no longer culture ambition. It is closing the distance between executive intent and employee experience."
To help organisations address these gaps, Cornerstone launched Cornerstone Workforce AI™, the intelligence platform for workforce readiness, designed to deliver the insights leaders want, the skills people need, and AI agents that make action easy.
At its core are the Cornerstone People Graph™ and Cornerstone Skills Engine, which combine to turn two decades of workforce data across 45 million users, terabytes of labour market intelligence, a taxonomy of more than 55,000 skills, over 1 billion workforce profiles, and signals from systems-of-record into an inference layer that powers every decision. The rich, dynamic context this creates, coupled with agentic orchestration, makes Cornerstone Workforce AI a powerful ally for organizations who want to deliver strategic outcomes faster and turn continuous workforce readiness into a competitive advantage.
About the research
The Hidden Number: The Economic Value of Culture and Capability is based on data from Cornerstone’s Culture and Capability Index, a research tool developed to measure the workforce conditions that shape organisational performance.
The Index draws on the responses from 452 leaders and 780 employees across Australia and New Zealand. Surveys were conducted in December of 2025 by YouGov.
The Index assesses workforce capability across six pillars. These include Skills Visibility, Learning Activation, Mobility and Career Pathways, Culture Engagement and Trust, Leadership and Change Capability, and AI and Workforce Planning.
These pillars represent a comprehensive set of mechanisms, systems or behaviours needed for organisations to build skill, retain talent, lead teams and be future ready. Each pillar is scored on a 0 to 100 scale and grouped into four maturity bands ranging from Lagging to Leading.
The Index compares how HR leaders assess their organisation’s capability with how employees experience it in practice. Any gaps in these comparisons expose where culture and capability efforts might be failing.
The report launches alongside the Culture and Capability Index Calculator, which allows ANZ organisations to benchmark their capability maturity, identify gaps across the six pillars and estimate the economic value of improvement based on workforce size.
About Cornerstone
At Cornerstone, we believe in AI that works in the service of people, amplifying their judgment to drive high-performing, future-ready organizations forward. Cornerstone Workforce AI™, the intelligence platform for workforce readiness, brings together workforce and labor market data into a proprietary Cornerstone People Graph™, translating signals into intelligence, targeting learning where it matters, developing critical skills, and surfacing hidden talent. Delivered as an open, enterprise platform across whatever application your people work in every day, Cornerstone Workforce AI is built for scale, security, and trust, with certified AI guardrails. As an industry leader, Cornerstone is helping approximately 7,000 organizations, 140M+ users, across 186 countries build continuous workforce readiness.
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