A Winning Approach to Employee Success

In 2020, the business community was gripped by a confluence of crises. A global pandemic, civil unrest, an economic crash, and a forced transformation to remote work caused chaos and uncertainty for many workplaces around the globe.

But an interesting thing happened.

After a decade of economic expansion—the longest in history—the employee engagement levels of U.S. workers spiked. It’s true. According to a Quantum Workplace study (and many other sources), the collective will of employees to advocate for their employers, to give discretionary effort, and to stay with their employers all topped out at new highs.

The retention aspect is predictable—an economic crisis isn’t an ideal time to be shopping around for a new job. But the elevated levels of advocacy and discretionary effort should silence the last remaining skeptics who thought engagement was a vanity metric and a lagging indicator of financial success.

Employee performance, on the other hand, has gained traction quickly in its connection to business outcomes. We know that high performers help teams meet goals and businesses get results. That’s why attracting, developing, and retaining top talent are critical. It’s why we’ve seen a wave of modernized performance management processes that help leaders understand, track, and maximize employee performance.

Both engagement and performance are invaluable to businesses. But for too long, too many organizations have seen these two important inputs as competing—or at the very least as mutually exclusive.

To turn culture into an unfair advantage, a new generation of talent leaders are merging engagement and performance. Together, these concepts drive employee success. They create a crescendo of individual and team pursuit. When engagement and performance are tethered together, goals and priorities are clear, managers are more agile to change, relationships are stronger, and organizational success is scripted rather than accidental.

Talent initiatives tend to be short experiments if they don’t deliver ROI. But the standard of ROI shouldn’t scare talent leaders. In fact, the more closely you tie engagement and performance outcomes, the easier ROI is to demonstrate. When performance is measured and discussed continuously, it builds engagement. And when engagement is monitored continuously, it motivates performance.

We partnered with Harvard Business Review Analytic Services to scrutinize this idea. Using empirical data and detailed interviews with HR and C-suite leaders, this research project weaves together two previously distinct practices among organizations. And it confirms an idea that will shape the next several economic cycles: businesses that integrate employee engagement and employee performance initiatives will create durable cultures that win.

Employee success has become the most important executive key performance indicators. And category leaders will be the businesses that best integrate employee engagement initiatives with employee performance measures.