With no actual framework to lay down its fundamentals, the performance culture is a holistic impersonation of the strategy and performance management system. While more than many organizations associate a high-performance culture with the proper working environment, there is much more to the concept than a friendly office, random perks, and casual benefits. Although there may not yet be a secret formula for creating a high-performance culture, we have managed to put together some sensible criteria for nurturing performance-driven employees:
1. Employee engagement – a discreet statement of motivation and commitment; employee engagement is the by-product of effective leadership, open communication, high-level support and encouragement, personal accountability, and talent management.
2. Continuous learning and development are key to creating a high-performance culture, which is the main driver of performance within an organization. Investments in training, education, and other educational opportunities will most certainly build mission-critical skills and competencies.
3. Aligned Performance Management System – a structured and coherent framework for measuring and monitoring both collective effort and individual contributions to the achievement of organizational goals; an ongoing process of defining and refining strategic objectives, setting and recalibrating KPIs and KPI targets, gathering, analyzing and reviewing performance data to drive improvement and optimization.
4. Inclusive environment and workforce diversity – Forward-thinking organizations capitalize on diverse backgrounds, multifaceted experiences, and manifold practices to develop, guide, and retain an inclusive and diverse workforce. High-performance cultures are representative of various segments of society, building on diverse knowledge to drive progressive initiatives.
5. Effective leadership and relationship management – A high–performance culture is often the result of fully functional partnerships between top/middle management levels and bottom-line employees. Successful management of such relationships bridges communication gaps while helping to build and maintain efficient and effective operations at all levels of the organization (strategic, departmental, and individual).
6. Sustainable work-life balance – often overlooked in generating expected results, work-life balance is a highly sensitive concept when it comes to maintaining and strengthening the performance culture within an organization. As much as it may seem that work-life balance can be maintained by close control of workloads and overtime, the concept is generally much more comprehensive. It sometimes takes special work-life programs, policies, and initiatives to feed into the employees’ need for balance, happiness, and well-being.
7. Discipline is a fundamental concept of high-performance cultures. It is based on principles of governance, responsibility, and high accountability. When linked to clearly articulated strategy and strong organizational values, discipline can overcome the need for hierarchy. Moreover, it can lead to the creation of multi-functional teams and nurture inter-changeable capabilities.
When it comes to creating winning performance cultures, best-performing organizations exhibit several attributes that make it easier to nurture and reinforce alignment. These core attributes work together to continuously strengthen the performance culture of the organization while effectively enabling it to achieve the desired results:
- · Honest and integrous employees within an organization will dispassionately contribute to its success, provided they are allowed to. When openness and candor are encouraged, free expression will most likely generate the most valuable ideas. An organization generates more benefits from uninhibited talent than by fostering an environment that is obstructive and authoritarian.
- · Performance-oriented — Many organizations believe that a performance culture is about people feeling content with the workplace and the working environment. However, a high-performance culture is just as much about producing the expected results as the performance management system itself. The performance-oriented organization will, therefore, ensure that strategy is cascaded down to all employees. At the same time, the performance measurement system stays focused on the results and achievements of all members within the organization.
- · Accountable and responsible high – performing organizations will ensure that ownership over performance results is correctly and justifiably distributed across all organizational levels. Effective leadership will create and maintain a motivated workforce working at its full potential.
- · Lenient and collaborative - Building a lenient and collaborative organization relies on several success factors, such as putting individual interests first before corporate benefits, raising focus on strategy and encouraging employees to voice their beliefs, encouraging collaboration to make a better workplace, leading by example, measuring what matters, and creating a supportive working environment.
- · Adaptive and agile organizations will be successful long–term because they can deliver value through knowledge. These organizations rely on a high-performance culture that delivers value through continuous learning.
- · Innovative – An increasingly dynamic marketplace requires the modern organization to be flexible and adaptive and to innovate to gain a competitive advantage. A high-performance culture seeks to use knowledge to ideate and get ahead of its competitors.
- · Forward-thinking – High organizational cultures are forward-thinking in the sense that they are future-oriented. Such organizations rely on long-term planning and inspire their employees and stakeholders through their vision. Knowing the organization’s future orientations will enable the performance culture to build on a collaborative effort to meet such aspirations.
Implementing a high-performance culture within the organization relies on several best practices to bring about the desired change. A holistic approach to creating a high-performance culture should be aimed at fusing a coherent and reliable Strategy and Performance Management System founded on the core elements of a performance-driven culture:
Integration into the overall Strategy and Performance Management System - Turn “organizational culture” into a measurable concept by developing and implementing specific measurement tools and techniques that are aligned and integrated with the overall strategy and performance management system within the organization.
A systematic approach towards creating the performance-driven culture - After the strategy and associated objectives have been decided upon, adopt a step-by-step approach towards reaching the goals set forth. Avoid focusing on all improvements at once and instead learn to prioritize them. For instance, assign a one-year-and-a-half-period to design a sound strategy and performance management architecture and improve the communication and leadership support process. After progress on these initiatives has been assessed, another year can be dedicated to increasing Employee Motivation and Engagement. All these elements of organizational culture should be deconstructed into sub-components utilized as milestones towards improvement.
Changes in performance culture blended into performance improvement initiatives - To ensure the success of creating a high-performance culture, associated endeavors should be integrated with business initiatives. If culture-related goals and objectives are monitored by themselves, chances are that they will be neglected by management and employees. One culture-related objective, such as “Create a culture of continuous learning,” can be combined with a strictly business-oriented objective, such as “Increase Sales.” Adequate initiatives for reaching this fused objective could be adopting mentoring programs or enabling communities of practice. Such initiatives will lead to sales increases through knowledge transfer from experienced, high-performing sales agents to the newly hired, while at the same time building a positive learning environment and fostering communication.
Organizational culture is often categorized as a soft topic regarding performance. However, people analytics and data-driven approaches are starting to provide more precise insight into what an organization needs to build a high-performance culture. Some valuable recommendations for using people analytics and data to drive a winning performance culture include:
1. Measuring culture with KPIs - using KPIs to measure culture is one of the most essential steps in transforming organizational culture from the soft topic it used to be to the core strategic pillar it should be. KPI results can help identify strengths and weaknesses in the existing organizational culture and then facilitate decision-making to drive improvement.
2. Actively using culture surveys - Simple yet meaningful culture surveys are one of the easiest, most effective ways to collect employee sentiment and feedback. Given their hardly complex and engaging format, when appropriately designed, culture surveys can become the perfect internal assessment tool.
3. Building on Talent Data and HR Analytics - Such technology allows organizations to improve their management and decision-making. When correctly employed, people analytics drives organizational culture by equipping leadership with insight data on talent recruitment and development, employee performance, and retention.
4. Relying on the Performance Management System to strengthen alignment - the one element that separates winning organizational cultures from fragmented ones is alignment. A structured and coherent Performance Management System will ensure that the performance culture is aligned with the strategic mission and values of the organization while building focus, agility, communication, collaboration, and well-being. By capitalizing on these cultural qualities, the Performance Management System will benefit from a strong, functional, and effective one.
