Building A Culture Conducive To High Performance

The first step to building a 100% performance culture is to recognise that not every day will be a 100% day. High performance can be consistent but it is rarely constant. As HR professionals and people leaders, we must understand and acknowledge that sustainability is only achieved when we consider the bigger picture – the long-term goals.

Breaks before a breakdown

A 2023 Culture Amp survey discovered that the top 1% performers in a company are responsible for 10% of the overall organisational output. This means that there is tremendous pressure on high performers, making it exceedingly important to reward top performance with timely breaks, ensure robust employee wellbeing programs, and ultimately understand that in the long-run, there are bound to be phases of lower output or average results.

Values embodied through behaviour

Organisational values are not a set of platitudes or abstract concepts. Values are only as good as how they are lived, and companies are increasingly defining their values through certain behaviours that they expect from their people. ‘Integrity’ for instance, isn’t just a buzzword – it is honesty in action, it is transparency in communication, it is the autonomy to hold people accountable for their errors, and it is the emphasis laid upon respect for one another. Breaking values down in this manner creates tangible takeaways for people and helps them understand what an organisation stands for, and how they can grow in its ecosystem.

Weaving values into performance

The next step after defining values and their behaviours is to map these to performance. While not all values are directly linked to performance, it’s imperative to create a culture that isn’t ‘get the work done’ but is, ‘get the work done the right way’. Getting a task completed through unethical means may ensure immediate business success, but is a deviation from company values, could backfire and make the company liable, and is a sign that employees do not respect the code. Every value, thus has some link to truly good performance – performance that is achieved through honest, sincere and competent means.

Feedback to feed-forward

Regular and consistent feedback is the cornerstone of continuous improvement. This is what enables high performers to thrive, and empowers others to aspire towards better results. Without feedback, we are all hamsters on a wheel – keeping busy, but without progress.

The personality of a business comes down to its culture and how the organisation drives performance amongst its people as well as how consistent this performance is. As we all chase the ‘ideal company culture’, let’s ask ourselves how we can build a growth environment for people – not for them to give a 100% every single day, but for them to know that they can recover from the below-100% days and bounce back.?