ABOUT SALTX
We’ve sat in your seat. We design the conditions we wished we had.
SaltX is a boutique people, culture & engagement advisory. Founded by a former CPO and a former Head of Engagement & Internal Comms, we partner directly with CHROs, CPOs, HR Directors, and executive teams to conduct research-led diagnostics and design the conditions for high performance.
Why we founded SaltX
After decades leading HR, talent acquisition, internal communications, and employee engagement inside high-growth and large complex organisations, we noticed a recurring breakdown.
Many organisations approach culture or engagement challenges by treating the symptoms with superficial solutions or as a 'nice to have'. They deliver off-the-shelf management training, roll out generic perks, or launch pulse surveys without an action plan.
Workplace breakdown is rarely an isolated skill gap. It's a system design issue.
We see culture & engagement as an end-to-end interconnected system that has a profound effect on business performance.
We founded SaltX to give people leaders a true peer partner: senior advisors with a unique perspective who work alongside you to conduct research-led diagnostics, provide executive coaching, and co-design workplace conditions where people thrive and that drive commercial performance.
C-suite people strategy meets workforce engagement leadership
Our strength lies at the intersection of strategic HR leadership and workforce engagement, where we connect people to performance. Too often HR strategists struggle to engage whole workforces, and most engagement and comms agencies don't understand talent pipelines or board-level metrics. We bring both to every engagement.
The Chief People Officer lens
Deep HR strategy & org design
Executive team and manager enablement, organisational architecture, talent acquisition & pipeline design, retention systems.
Focus
Leadership and structural alignment, commercial levers, and board metrics.
Co-Founder Ben Howells is a former Chief People Officer.
The Engagement & Comms lens
Culture, experience & narrative
Systemic culture analysis and design, employee engagement and internal comms strategy, and strategic change storytelling.
Focus
Authentic buy-in, engagement, and execution.
Co-Founder Matt Morgan is former Head of Engagement & Comms.
The boutique advantage
When you appoint SaltX, you don't pay for large consultancy overhead or get handed off to junior associates. You work directly with senior partners who have navigated board pressure, restructuring, rapid scaling, and cultural transformation from the inside.
Research-led: The Employee Experience System Map
We view your organisation as an interconnected network. Before prescribing solutions, we research and map your workforce alongside your team to identify the exact friction points and levers that impact performance.
The SaltX Employee Experience Tube Model
Step 1
Systemic research & diagnosis
We audit your end-to-end environment using focus groups, one-to-one interviews, desk research and survey re-analysis to identify performance levers before designing solutions.
Step 2
Co-designing workplace conditions
We work alongside your internal teams to align leadership around strategy and design manager frameworks, recognition systems, and employee lifecycle journeys.
Step 3
Creating shared strategic narratives
We build the engagement strategy, shared strategic narrative and internal comms plans to ensure strategy lands authentically across every department.
Step 4
Enablement, coaching and learning
We equip your leaders through targeted leadership coaching, manager toolkits, and clear capability frameworks, and deliver tailored L&D programmes.
How we operate
Partnership over prescription ('with, not to')
We build capability alongside your team rather than imposing external templates. We leave your internal leaders equipped to own and sustain the outcomes long-term.
Integrated leadership coaching
We use one-to-one and team executive coaching as a primary method to support senior leaders as they navigate strategic realignments and system changes.
Research-led & performance-driven
We don't guess or push cookie-cutter toolkits. We get under the skin of your challenge with research to identify the specific levers that drive commercial performance and ROI.
Systems over quick fixes
We design the conditions where high performance happens naturally, moving away from short-term perks and off-the-shelf training, to fix the root cause.
Get to know us
We’re lifelong students of business, leadership, people and engagement and have a rich understanding of the research that ties a highly engaged workforce with business performance that outstrips the competition. There’s a lot of it, it’s robust and it’s been tested across geographies and industries.
But for us, it’s not just academic. We’ve been in senior leadership roles ourselves for decades in businesses from large corporates with hundreds of thousands of people to exciting start ups and scale ups with less than a hundred people. We’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. Our work doesn’t end in a deck. It changes people’s experiences and tracks through to better business performance.
Frequently asked questions
How does SaltX differ from traditional management consultancies?
We operate as true partners rather than distant advisors. Traditional consultancies often send junior teams to apply rigid, pre-packaged frameworks. We work directly with you as senior ex-in-house peers, combining research-led diagnostics, executive coaching, and co-design to build capability within your existing team.
Are you a full-service HR agency?
No. We are a specialised strategic advisory focused on strategy clarification, organisational design, employee experience, internal comms, and leadership coaching. We intentionally do not offer legal HR compliance, compensation/benefits consulting, or standard L&D workshop delivery.
What size organisations do you typically work with?
We specialise in mid-market and fast-growth organisations (typically 50 to 2,000+ headcount) especially around key inflection points like rapid scaling, reorgs, or post-acquisition integration. We also work with enterprise scale organisations, where we have considerable experience.
