Organizational High Performance:

Organizational efficiency and effectiveness (performance) and fiscal wellbeing have held utmost importance for some time. However, if the true source of organizational performance is your people, have we been looking at the equation backwards?

  • In our July, 2025 article “To What Degree Has HR Created a 4X Increase to Your Organization’s Performance and Value?”, we cited Aberdeen Group’s global study 2015 “Employee Engagement: Paving the Way to Customer Loyalty” It revealed that elevated employee engagement drives a 233% increase in customer retention, expansion, and referral. This underscores the strategic connection between internal culture and external market performance;
  • HRO Magazine selected their 2015 CHRO of the Year Award recipient for his achievement in correlating employee and customer satisfaction at Mohegan Gaming & Entertainment with 13,000 global employees. Innovatively, as global CHRO from 2005 – 2017, Kawel LauBach brought customer satisfaction into HR and consistently measured impact of employee engagement against customer satisfaction. He found direct, monthly correlation (within 0.1%) between the two and achieved 94% engagement and satisfaction. We are proud of Kawel’s affiliation with our firm and his having proven high performance and value as a result of aligned and integrated HR and organization development.
  • The annual Fortune Magazine 100 Best Companies to Work For listed companies report:
    • 19 percentage points’ outperformance in market returns (74% vs. 55%);
    • 86% of employees using discretionary effort (engagement)
    • 4X greater employee retention (half the turnover rate)
    • 15X more likely to be selected as an employer of choice by candidates

 

Key Takeaway

Employee engagement and performance matter. It’s important to remember that it is the efforts of people which create the resulting performance metrics.

 

Enter… Today’s Foremost People & Organizational Challenges:

  • Employee fatigue and lack of resilience from two decades of relentless:
    • Performance pressures for high levels of service and “do more with less”
    • Elevated employee turnover, lower unemployment rates, and lower numbers of unemployed workers
  • Average employee engagement in the U.S. has declined to a ‘basement level’ of only 29-30% engaged employees with 52% disengaged and 19% actively disengaged. Leaders, managers and HR have a critical and immense performance imperative and opportunity to develop a more engaging, performing, market competitive, and customer-loyal organization. (Note: Comparatively, Fortune’s 100 Best have only 5-12% disengaged and 2-3% actively disengaged employees)
  • More recent disruption of inclusive cultures’ which leverage the vast array of differences (inclusive of all people) across four (4) generations and ‘gig economy’ mindsets
  • Pressures to digitize and AI-itize amid concerns about organization and role design, job losses, and reduced brain functionality as recently cited by MIT’s study
  • Average historic change management success levels at 30% yet, as much as 80% with adept HR change management competence. If we then add current levels of employee fatigue and resistance to additional change demands, what can we reliably predict for change management success?

 

Key Takeaway

While highly engaged organizations will soon likely experience AI implementation performance gains, most others will wrestle with significant internal turmoil.

 

What We Believe: Great Employee-First Cultures Drive Higher Performance.

  • To create high performance, team members are considered knowledge and partnership workers. As such, they are genuinely motivated to bring their full selves (self-efficacy) to work. Adam Grant, Psychology Professor, Wharton in his book “Originals” Penguin Books, 2017 and The American Psychological Association, which completed a meta-analysis on this concept concur.
  • We also believe that when an individual feels that they can be their full self (experience self-efficacy), they tend to do their best work, feel happy, and then naturally convey their happiness to a customer which then causes that customer to feel a bit happier and well served, ultimately strengthening customer loyalty.

Critical Needs of Organizational Culture Now

  • First and foremost, to increase trust in leadership to thereby elevate employee engagement
  • Develop a sense of belonging and active collaboration among team members to:
    • meld differentiating strengths (knowledge, expertise, & perspectives) of four (4) workplace generations;
    • advance performance through knowledge, skill, and behavioral development, mentoring, and coaching as well as through role expansion, internal and external collaboration, career pathing, and succession planning; and
    • spur innovation, the life-blood of organizations
  • Elevate an internal and external sense of service and caring to effectively attract, engage and retain talent (especially GenZ)
  • Create a culture of empowerment and agency – ability, capacity, and support for people to take action and make decisions within this scope of their role

How Can We Succeed?

The goal of creating a Caring Culture of High-Performance is to create a work environment where team members are encouraged to act with agency, empowerment, trust, and respect to feel safe to turn to leaders and other team members for support in achieving their contributions to organizational goals.

1. Effect a Thoughtful Mindset Shift

  • Mindset: A mindset is a mental process that influences the behaviors and actions we take.
  • Old Mindsets were derived from the “Industrial Revolution,” when people in the workplace were expected to do only what they were told and had narrow bandwidth and actions within their jobs. Over time, this type of mindset led to people feeling micro-managed, smothered, and stifled, resulting in an unhappy workforce.
  • A New Mindset of Caring
    • will strengthen employee and customer bonds as well as increase relatability, communication, performance, loyalty, and innovation.
    • leads to enhanced collaboration where leaders and team members feel safe to speak up and interact with each other. Team member ideas are listened to even when they may not be aligned with their leaders.
    • supports collective learning and embracing differences of opinion which drives high-performance and innovation.

2. Establish Interaction Safety

  • The second step to developing a caring culture is to create an environment through intentional actions and behaviors which encourage reasonable risk-taking, idea sharing, and creation of an inclusive, collaborative workplace. It establishes an environment that makes people feel safe enough to share not just their best ideas, but ideas that are still in-formation.
  • When interaction safety exists, people know they will not be slighted, discounted, shunned, penalized, or demoted because of their thought and contributions.
  • To achieve Interaction Safety, leaders will need to authentically and intentionally encourage interaction safety, create policies and practices that support interaction safety, and provide team members the freedom to engage with each other, to be wrong, and to learn.

3. Upskill to Effect Agency

  • The third step in this journey of creating a culture of caring is to unleash “Agency.” It is key to meeting the needs of individuals and teams. Agency is the sense of an individual that they are trusted to have the authority to make key decisions within the scope of their role in the organization.
  • People at this point know they can be their full self, are deserving members of the organization, and can feel confident that their voice will be heard.
  • When people are not allowed to exercise Agency, they often feel unappreciated and may retreat into the role of “do-er,” completing tasks as told and checking most or every decision with their manager. Lack of agency with their manager is often the reason, or a contributing reason people leave their organization to seek another opportunity to effectively apply their time, their talent, and knowledge where it will be appreciated.
  • In an organization with Agency, team members feel a sense of ownership and accountability for their organization’s success. They can make decisions to make things happen within their areas of responsibility and improve things in their workspace and throughout the organization.

Resources:

 

By Regan MacBain Traub, Founder & Managing Principal with contributions by Yvonne Alverio, Culture & Collaboration Practice Leader