Creating a High-Performance Culture: From Vision to Execution

A business's culture will either support quality and high performance or will prevent employees and the company as a whole from achieving targets. As a part of human behavior, performance does not appear out of thin air alongside talent or knowledge. Leaders must nurture these values through organic processes to ensure they remain after a specific project or campaign ends.

The path to creating a high-performance culture within a business involves an understanding of the elements that compose this culture and a commitment to taking steps to make them a reality.

A high-performance culture: primary characteristics and key benefits

Companies with a high-performance culture demonstrate this through 6 characteristics visible in small teams and throughout the entire employee and leadership workforce. These include trust, a commitment to growth and learning, supportive leadership, respect, transparency, and agility. While separate points, their interaction builds on each other to nurture employee value in high performance.

Here is a breakdown of the 6 characteristics of a high-performance culture with details:

1. Trust: Individuals know their concerns and ideas will be met with honest feedback and support, while they also understand everyone will perform their work responsibly. 
2. Commitment to growth and learning: A company encourages its employees and teams to strive for more knowledge and skills while rewarding those who achieve new levels of performance.
3. Supportive leadership: Leaders guide and mentor employees and provide opportunities for them to express ideas and experiment.
4. Respect: Within teams and across a company, individuals understand their value and that of others.
5. Transparency: Information that is helpful to everyone is shared, and work is visible throughout a project.
6. Agility: Teams and individuals adapt to changing circumstances without great stress and understand that new circumstances are opportunities to grow and develop.

These characteristics are considered positive elements within teams and businesses due to the benefits they deliver:

• High performance: This obvious benefit is backed by research. Thanks to the trust found in such companies, individuals report an overall boost in productivity, including 106% more energy at work, 13% fewer sick days, and 40% less burnout.
• Employee engagement and investment: As a critical driver of business success, the level of engagement among employees is a fruitful benefit that comes with high-performing teams. It intersects with the statistics above to support higher job satisfaction and lower turnover rates.
• Lower employee turnover: A high-performing company culture creates an environment where employees are valued and understand their importance within the organization. As a result, they feel less inclined to leave and look for these benefits in other places.
• Attractive to new talent: Current employees will advertise their workplace, leading to a strong desire among young professionals to work in a company with this culture.
• Client satisfaction: An added benefit of high productivity and performance is that clients appreciate the results they receive and share their satisfaction with others to grow the company's client base.

8 steps to build a high-performance culture

1. Define the culture to start the transformation 

Any steps a company adopts to build a high-performance culture will fail without a sincere shift in culture and mindset. Business leaders have recognized this truth for years:

The original idea that "culture eats strategy for breakfast" comes from management theorist Peter Drucker and has backing in science, with a strong connection between employees and culture leading to more engagement at work and more attractive recommendations to others to find work at the company. While it may seem a small step, the acknowledgment of culture's importance is the first step to making positive changes. The following actions will require time and patience; however, when leadership commits to these adjustments, the benefits will appear.

2. Develop trust and transparency throughout the company

After a shift in mindset, trust is a crucial element to nurture but is often overestimated by business leaders. In research by PWC, 86% of business executives rated employee trust as high, while only 67% of employees indicated they trust their employer. To close the trust gap, companies ensure their leadership becomes more available for discussions and communication. Here are steps that encourage this:

• AMA sessions: Meetings where employees can ask leadership anything about the company or industry increase transparency and help nurture a stronger, personal connection between employees and a business's leadership. They can be organized with top management and department heads together or separately.
• Visible communication: Another way to encourage transparency is to bring key decision-making discussions and processes into the open. AMA sessions are part of this, as are efforts to move certain communication from private messages into public channels. This strategy can empower employees by giving them visibility into decision-making processes so they understand the reasoning behind strategic initiatives.

3. Develop clear performance metrics

Apart from communication, clear performance metrics help create a high-performance culture by setting transparent expectations for success and growth. When employees understand the specific criteria for advancement and evaluation, they are more motivated to excel and align their efforts with business objectives. These types of metrics eliminate ambiguity and confusion around promotions to guarantee that individuals receive proper recognition based on measurable achievements rather than subjective opinions.

This fosters a sense of fairness and accountability that drives employees to take ownership of their performance. As a result, businesses cultivate a results-driven environment where employees are consistently engaged, productive, and focused on continuous improvement.

4. Encourage growth and learning

Individuals and teams within a company can only perform at an exceptional level when they have the necessary knowledge and skills to do so. As technology and approaches evolve, employees need to remain up-to-date on these changes. Businesses can allot resources to a learning and development (L&D) budget to provide employees the opportunity to attend courses and conferences on the latest developments in their area of expertise. Another strategy includes a mentorship program that allows experienced professionals to grow through sharing and supporting younger colleagues. Also, assigning challenging tasks to employees gives them an opportunity to demonstrate their skills and feel they can be trusted.

5. Demonstrate support

This point overlaps with the one above; however, the focus moves away from creating opportunities for employee development to removing roadblocks to this growth. One of those factors is micromanagement. This approach to overseeing the work of employees typically comes from a lack of trust and an overall immature leadership style. Instead of constant checks that impede employee performance, leaders can adopt a positive control mentality that establishes clear expectations based on trust. This approach emphasizes support for employees who struggle with tasks and applies data-based signals to understand when leaders need to intervene.

Another way to demonstrate support is by offering employees clear paths to career advancement. Do not promise promotions or growth if there are none to provide. When employees know what they can accomplish, they will work toward that goal and appreciate the honesty of managers who recognize when they can no longer contribute to a team.

6. Hire the corresponding talent

In addition to supporting the new culture among existing employees, companies will need to ensure that they hire the right talent that helps them continue to build a high-performance culture. This ensures that employees have the skills, mindset, and work ethic needed to contribute effectively. When businesses prioritize candidates who align with their culture and expectations, they create teams that are naturally driven to excel. To do this, it is important to:

• Describe expectations in a clear way on the job announcement
• Be sincere and detailed when showing the company’s culture
• Consider questions to candidates that reflect expectations

The right hires reduce turnover, enhance collaboration, and bring fresh perspectives that drive innovation. A workforce composed of capable, motivated individuals fosters a culture of accountability and excellence. When businesses approach the employee hiring and selection process with care and attention, they lay the foundation for sustained success and high performance. Likewise, the recruitment process is an opportunity to advertise the company’s culture and values.

7. Value and apply feedback

All of the steps listed here must be conducted with respect to employee feedback and allow for adjustments. A plan may look good on paper or a screen but will remain there without people performing the necessary actions to implement it. Today, there are countless tools for creating surveys and conducting interviews anonymously and in organized ways. The most important aspect is to ask the right questions to receive helpful answers and to consider when to conduct surveys:

• Before implementing changes and after
• Onboarding and exit interviews
• During performance reviews

Then, leadership must show they take employee responses seriously and respectfully through actions that implement ideas and considerations from the surveys. AMA sessions are another platform that management can use to indicate they have gathered and understood what employees feel and to address any concerns expressed in the surveys.

8. Lead by example

The steps outlined above all contribute to building a high-performing culture, although there is one more essential element to this process: sincerity. The right culture, AMA sessions, and clear career paths will not deliver the expected and necessary results if a company’s leadership does not believe in the purpose and in spending time and other resources on implementation. This connects to every point mentioned in this article. Leaders need to be prepared for AMA sessions and be assessed under the same transparent processes as their employees. 

Technology and high-performance

Various technologies exist to help leaders and businesses as a whole create a culture that values high performance and leads to increased productivity and quality. These do not have to be the fanciest platforms, though such instruments are very useful. Small teams and companies without the means to invest in expensive software can find support in simpler tools. In either case, the leadership of any company can benefit from applying technology, such as:

• Task trackers: A staple of modern companies, these instruments organize tasks and projects into efficient workflows and allow teams to adjust the processes to match their individual cultures and needs.
• Reminder bots: Reduce micromanagement and can be customized for any type of reminder or alert in any messenger that a team or business uses.
• Employee self-service tools: Empower employees to request time off and salary reviews, among other things, without waiting for replies from HR managers or sending unnecessary emails and messages. 
• AI-powered performance management: Harness the power of 24/7 AI monitoring to collect data and produce reports on performance and other areas in minutes without spending extra human resources. AI provides actionable insights based on this data that align with a company's goals.

These and other tools go beyond tracking employee time and activity to helping personnel and leadership work toward a common goal without the unnecessary baggage that often accompanies such efforts: excessive communication and micromanagement. The best kind of instrument is one that combines several or all of the elements listed above. One such tool is Enji.

Enji and high-performance culture

The Human Resources team within a business is one of the crucial elements involved in the development of a high-performance culture. The traditional approach to effective HR management within an organization has been the Harvard framework, which emphasizes four "C's" to guide practices:

1. Commitment: Describes the bond between employee and their company.
2. Competence: Refers to the knowledge, skills, and other requirements that enable an employee within a specific company to perform their job well.
3. Congruence: Indicates how compatible an employee is with their workplace and job.
4. Cost-effectiveness: Guides HR practices to achieve the maximum benefit at the lowest possible cost.

Enji's features support these HR pillars through background data gathering and analysis that does not interfere with the workflow of the business and ensures employees follow best practices to perform well.

• Employee Pulse: This tool gathers data on employee performance to prevent burnout. Managers receive signals on changes in behavior that signal when employees require assistance and support.
• HR dashboard: HR managers can use Enji's HR dashboard to collect and store employee data in a single location without the need for multiple tools.
• Employee-powered reviews: Enji gives employees the option to request a salary and performance review from their dashboard without the stress of sending messages to managers or HR.
• Easy 1-1s: The Enji platform helps HR and managers gauge employee satisfaction and track the frequency of meetings.

Data feeds performance

Businesses can implement changes to their culture that empower employees and strengthen the connection between individuals, teams, and management. To maintain these changes and ensure employees have the proper structure they need to continue these healthy processes, companies can utilize the data they create from their workflows. This helps leaders monitor signals on employee behavior that indicate where support and feedback is required.