Having a high-performance culture enables your organization to achieve great feats on a consistent basis, create synergy among work groups and attract top talent. In this article, you’ll understand the meaning and significance of a high-performance culture and ways to achieve it in your workplace.
A successful business requires a strong team of high performers who are almost fanatical about the company’s interests and objectives. The business landscape is a corporate brawl where each party has to employ rather crafty strategies to put down the competition and get ahead.
Businesses have to be deliberate about talent as having the best team can either spell glory or disaster for an organization. As such, hiring shouldn’t only be based on academic achievements or textbook understanding; the individual and their mindset are also factors in the equation. Are they capable of thinking and acting independently when the need arises? Do they subscribe to the organization’s vision and long and short-term objectives? Are they capable of doing the right thing when no one is looking?
There’s usually a difference in performance between an employee who delivers according to their job description and an employee who’s got skin in the game and is deeply interested in the organization’s goals and vision coupled with possessing the right skill-set.
The performance of an employee isn’t necessarily judged or measured by how much time they spend toiling away.
Top companies across the world with high-performance cultures actively poach employees that embody the right skills and enthusiasm for the organization’s objectives, and with the right incentives, they’d gladly jump ship.
Believe it or not, there is exceptional talent out there. Companies that comprise the Fortune 500, expectedly, have a high-performance culture and are staffed by high performers that take pride in what they do – collaborating with team members to achieve remarkable results.
In the subsequent paragraphs, you’ll understand the meaning of a high-performance culture and how to build one:
Ways to build a high-performance culture
1. Team make-up
The basic cornerstone of creating strong teams is team make-up. Employers and team leaders should assess each team member for complimentary talents and a team-player attitude. This is crucial for creating and sustaining a high-performance culture. A stable team should be hand-selected, and once the team is put together, every effort should be made to keep it stable.
Having a team where everyone gets along and can communicate openly is crucial. This occurs when they share the team leader's values and cooperate to accomplish a common objective. Team members produce more when they begin to think that they can succeed as a unit. The characteristics of a cohesive team—shared ideals, active participation, and mutual trust—increase productivity significantly.
A team that works well together can accomplish more quickly than other teams. However, it also risks being overly cohesive and prone to groupthink. If this goes unchecked, the team could make incorrect conclusions.
It is crucial for team leaders to maintain continual communication with their members towards keeping them focused on the mission.
2. Set measurable goals
Creating a high-performance culture requires setting quantifiable, practical goals with a clear purpose. High-performing team members are more motivated, energized, and innovative when they have a clear objective to attain. Their shared goals connect with the defining quality of any high-performance team: getting more done in less time. Such groups maintain a positive and productive atmosphere by providing rewards and acknowledgement for successful work.
3. Insist on the value of learning
Building a high-performance team requires fostering a culture of continuous learning to deal with the problems of skill shortages and various digital transitions. Emerging technologies in particular are constantly evolving. As a result, corporations place a high value on their staff's continuous learning and ongoing skill development. Although there is a lot of learning that happens within a team, improving a team's skills through training and documentation tools is equally important in creating a high-performance team.
4. Preach innovation and research
Leaders must encourage innovation, creativity, and research at all levels in order to create a high-performance culture. They must foster an atmosphere where workers are encouraged to be interested and try new things without worrying about facing consequences if they fail. People are better able to create and achieve at a higher level when they can view failures as a learning curve.
We can draw from the innovation and experimentation that tech behemoths like Google and Amazon foster in their workforces. For instance, Google's "innovation policy" allows all staff members to dedicate up to 20% of their working time to their own initiatives. Because of this independence, Google was able to develop Google Maps, Gmail, and Google News.
While some businesses are unable to provide their employees with such rules owing to time and financial limitations, they can still promote creativity by pushing people outside their usual environments. For instance, give people the chance to make mistakes, teach staff members how to articulate new ideas, and provide discussion boards where people may present new projects.
5. Practice giving continuous feedback
Effectiveness and frequent feedback are strongly correlated. Employees that receive adequate performance feedback will improve personally and professionally, pick up new skills, and succeed. Leaders must adopt a feedback culture that promotes constructive conversations across the organization. This is necessary for creating a high-performance culture.
Although both formal and informal feedback should be used, continual, informal feedback is the most powerful. Feedback between an employee and boss should be spontaneous, particular to an incident, and two-way. Encourage managers to give timely feedback (both positive and constructive) to their teams. They can do this by giving them informal feedback training to help them strengthen their coaching and mentoring techniques.
To sum up, it takes time, effort, and commitment to change the character of any firm. But the senior executives' new strategic vision should serve as the catalyst. By following the methods highlighted above, you may gradually imbibe a high-performance culture with the benefit of impacting your organization positively in more ways than one.
6. Independence and accountability
Traditional performance management methods encourage managers to micromanage their staffers, turning them into rote task-completers rather than creative problem-solvers who can suggest new approaches to problems. Strong company culture can be created by ensuring that employees are held responsible for their work. In addition, employees should be allowed and empowered to make decisions autonomously. The essential norms of an organization should also include strong ethical and legal ethos.
