Leverage HR to Empower Careers and Foster Transparent Management
Budgets are tight. Margins are thin. Every hire is an investment in your future. So, it’s important to ensure your company culture is focused on performance, aligning with both your business goals and the career needs of your employees.
Ask yourself: Do my employees feel empowered to perform at their best? Do those who manage employees have the tools they need to successfully support direct reports?
If your answers are anything other than a resounding YES, it’s having a direct impact on the productivity and success of your workforce.
It can be challenging to build an intentional, thoughtful performance culture. Let’s take a closer look at what it means to cultivate a performance culture, why it matters for employee engagement and employee retention, and why HR might turn to a consultant for support.
What Defines a Performance Culture
A performance culture is geared toward workforce motivation and development. It involves adopting a combination of strategies, tools, and repeatable practices specifically designed to inspire employees and enhance organizational success.
While you might think the term performance culture is a euphemism for “success at all costs,” in actuality it’s the opposite. It’s about success at less cost and greater benefit to each employee, where growth, transparency, and accountability (for the workforce AND the company) take center stage.
For example, a culture that revolves around improved performance will empower managers and employees to enact honest, ever-present feedback loops. It will focus on adopting more intuitive, customizable performance management tools. It will enact clear career roadmaps for every role in the organization and foster an environment of trust and respect.
The Link Between Performance Culture and Employee Engagement + Employee Retention
If employees feel at a loss when it comes to connecting their efforts to company success, or if they feel they are left to determine performance and career benchmarks on their own, employee engagement will naturally suffer. As an offshoot, employee retention is likely to decline.
A performance culture recognizes both the individual within the workforce and the workforce as a whole. It’s this spotlight on contribution that helps move the needle toward better engagement and increased retention.
Employee Engagement
You’ve worked hard to attract the right employees. Once you hire them, you need to work just as hard to keep them interested (and employed!). That means engaging them early and often in their career journey.
A performance culture does just that—it focuses on employee goals, performance, and growth, with measurable benchmarks and a clear framework designed to erase ambiguity.
According to Gallup, “45% of voluntary leavers report that neither a manager nor another leader proactively discussed their job satisfaction, performance or future with the organization…” Actively engaging employees in shaping their job trajectory can be the difference between constant attrition and lasting tenure within your ranks.
Employee Retention
Your valuable talent resources might already have a foot out the door. As noted by Gallup, “33% of workers plan to look for a new job next year, and 51% of U.S. employees are watching or actively seeking a new job.”
Sure, it could be for reasons beyond your control—family issues, moving, illness, a desire to try a completely new career. But what if the reason is because your employees feel unheard or unable to progress any further? That’s a situation you CAN do something about.
By prioritizing a performance culture, you can ensure areas of employee development are integrated into performance conversations from the start, for better alignment between individual and organizational goals.
In this way expectations cannot outpace reality. All members of your workforce can clearly see their value and contributions and, most importantly, see a path forward within your organization.
The Role of HR in Building a Performance Culture
HR plays a pivotal role in employee engagement by employing the right tools and tactics to improve everything from resource training to the performance evaluation process.
In a similar way, HR is also the catalyst in fostering employee retention—from helping to create personalized development plans to improving the performance dynamic between employees and managers.
But creating a culture around performance, especially one where managers and employees feel empowered to excel and support business goals, takes a concerted, three-pronged approach.
3 Ps Essential to Performance Culture
- Processes. It’s not enough to establish clear goals. There must be avenues in place that allow your workforce to achieve (and exceed!) them. The most impactful processes HR can initiate are those focused on performance management. In particular, a formal process for performance reviews that outlines feedback cadence, core competency alignment, development plan creation, goal-setting best practices, success measurement, and the tools/technologies to be used to simplify each step.
- Policies. Formal policies around open communication, concrete company values, and performance expectations give your workforce a shared playbook from which to operate—one that reinforces equal understanding, whether entry-level or CEO. Policies developed to support a performance culture typically cover: performance reviews, advancement/promotion, communication channels, HR engagement, ongoing learning, grievance escalation, and putting values into practice.
- Programs. From those designed to enhance communication or improve managerial skills, to those designed to offer additional training and mentorship opportunities, HR’s unique view of the company as a whole is the perfect launching point for programs that support the goals, values, and benefits of a performance culture.
How HR Consulting and Workforce Planning Can Help
Achieving a performance culture doesn’t happen overnight. Those “three P’s” take dedicated time, resources, planning, and follow-up to create an environment that ultimately drives workforce satisfaction and organizational success.
Given the lion’s share of the effort is shouldered by human resources, if you’re considering pursuing a performance-based model it’s good to first evaluate whether your HR function can support it.
You may be a small company with only one person earmarked to handle everything around HR. Or, you may be a larger company with a dedicated HR department, but one that has little spare time for anything other than business-critical issues.
In both cases, outsourced HR consulting and workforce planning can offer relief. Turning to a third-party HR expert to offload the creation and execution of a performance culture model lets you arrive at a tailored, customized strategy without impacting current business operations.
- Design performance management solutions that optimize efficiency
- Create talent training and development protocols that elevate your workforce
- Develop “uniquely you” company culture and engagement processes
If you’re curious whether HR consulting services are right for you, feel free to get in touch. We’d love to talk over your options.
