Building a sustainable, future-focused, high-performance culture
3 July 2025
Exceptional employee performance… a high-performance culture: it’s every business owner’s ambition. High-performing employees who consistently deliver help businesses thrive, championing innovation, growth and creativity. It sounds fantastic, and it can be, but only if you’re providing employees with the support and tools they need to take care of their wellbeing. Being laser-focused on outcomes may lead to you missing the bigger picture. Read on to explore the benefits and potential pitfalls of a high-performance culture and how to get the balance right.
Summary:
What is a high-performance culture?
How do you measure a high-performance culture?
What is an example of a high-performance culture?
What are the benefits of a high-performance culture?
High-performance culture challenges
How do you build a sustainable, future-focused, high-performing culture?
Build a sustainable, future-focused, high-performance culture with Pluxee UK
What is a high-performance culture?
A high-performance culture is where employees are highly engaged and motivated to deliver results for their employer. There’s more to it than assessing results and surveys. Optimal employee performance stems from empowering your people to be their best by providing them with the necessary support and tools to deliver results.
It’s not about dangling a carrot or cracking a whip.
You can only maintain consistent performance when you have critical elements in place, such as a positive workplace culture that adopts a holistic approach to employee wellbeing.
Essential elements of a high-performing culture include:
- A robust Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policy that nurtures autonomy, empathy and psychological safety.
- Strong leaders who don’t micromanage empower employees to take ownership of their decisions.
- Clear guidelines, procedures, and defined roles and responsibilities.
- A collaborative culture where employees share knowledge a don’t work in siloes, with a strong focus on teamwork.
The results = a business with better business outcomes.
How do you measure a high-performance culture?
There are many ways to measure high employee performance. The obvious is results-based and includes:
- Achieving or surpassing targets
- Significant organic growth
- Client retention levels
- Customer satisfaction scores
- New business acquired
- Comparison with competitors.
Data is a reliable way to measure employee performance, but you need to gather a variety of inputs to get a complete picture, including:
- Absenteeism rates
- Retention rates
- Net Promoter Score
- Employee satisfaction results.
A business meeting sales targets might look like a high-performing culture, but if their absenteeism rates are high, it suggests deeper issues, like stress and burnout, which may become an issue, hindering future performance. That’s why it’s crucial to look beyond the numbers and get a holistic view.
What is an example of a high-performance culture?
Given the measures we’ve mentioned above, a high-performance culture is one where employees consistently meet targets, engagement levels are high, retention rates are solid, and absenteeism is average or below. If you don’t have all these elements in place, you’re a company that’s performing well, but you’re not experiencing a culture of high employee performance because the levels aren’t sustainable.
Something will eventually give.
If turnover is high, performance will drop while you repeatedly bring new recruits up to speed. If it looks like you’re meeting goals and KPIs, but your absenteeism levels are high, it will put more pressure on the rest of your workforce.
What are the benefits of a high-performance culture?
A high-performance culture brings many business benefits.
- Productivity and profitability: Exceptional employee performance leads to increased productivity and profitability.
- Talent retention: In a true high-performing workplace that prioritises employee wellbeing, your workforce will feel valued, supported, recognised and accomplished, making them more likely to stay.
- Engagement and motivation: When employees are more engaged and motivated, they’ll go the extra mile, seeing business wins as personal wins – shared successes.
- Innovation: Psychological safety is prevalent in a high-performing culture, along with autonomy and trust, which enable employees to innovate, create, and take risks.
- New markets: A high-performance culture has the perfect mix of people, passion, skills, and drive to conquer new markets.
- Stakeholder satisfaction: When all the numbers and graphs point in the right direction, your stakeholders will be satisfied, including clients, partners and consumers.
Great things happen when you empower your employees to perform!
High-performance culture challenges
Creating a high-performing culture has its challenges. As we discussed when reviewing what a high-performance culture looks like, there are several key elements that you must put in place to ensure its sustainability.
Performance masking
In a recent interview with People Management, Pluxee UK MD, Graham James, shared insights on performance masking.
Behind every statistic about workplace mental health is a person whose life hangs in the balance. In a world where 91% of workers are struggling with stress, and where presenteeism costs businesses £25bn annually, the employee at the greatest risk might be the one who seems to be coping best.
Graham’s words are sobering, encouraging managers and leaders to ensure they’re not fooled by the numbers and to ensure every employee feels safe enough to speak openly about their health and wellbeing.
Fixation on targets
We can’t stress enough how important it is to look beyond targets and numbers, not least because of the risk of performance masking, but also the further negative impact of only rewarding success when it ticks a certain box.
As Renante Hayes, Executive Director at Creloaded, an e-commerce consultancy, says...
I've witnessed firsthand the pitfalls of purely performance-based reward systems. When we worked with a tech client implementing a high-performer bonus structure, their retention rate among mid-level employees dropped 30% within six months.
Isolation and disengagement
High levels of employee turnover aren’t the only issue, as employees don’t always leave a business when they’re dissatisfied.
Renante continues…
The morale impact on lower-categorised employees is severe. We've seen increased turnover, reduced collaboration, and workplace anxiety.
Disengagement is a productivity and performance killer. Unhappy employees who feel undervalued are more likely to experience workplace stress, which could increase absenteeism.
How do you build a sustainable, future-focused, high-performing culture?
There are four key elements to building a high-performing culture: enable, encourage, empower, and engage. We’ll now delve into each in more detail to provide you with practical ways to implement them.
Enable
As we’ve already suggested, enabling doesn’t mean dangling a carrot – incentives can work, but it’s not enablement in its truest form because it isn’t sustainable.
Prioritise wellbeing
Employee performance will decline as their wellbeing does. When resilience and energy levels are low, you can expect a dip in employee performance. A sustainable high-performance culture must provide wellbeing support – physical, mental and financial to allow employees to bring their best selves to work.
Continuous learning
When you prioritise learning and development, you enable your employees to perform better by equipping them with new and improved skills. Whether you tailor their education to the tricks of the trade – what they need to know to perform better – or whether you focus on personal learning, such as tips to improve their lifestyle, knowledge is power.
Encourage
Encouragement comes in different forms. Rewarding and recognising a job well done encourages employees to repeat desired behaviours. To encourage is also to give confidence, to show trust in an employee’s abilities, nudging them out of their comfort zones.
Collaboration vs competition
Competition is healthy. When done right. The problem with competition is that it can lead to siloed working, distrust and conflict. You could also exhaust employees who perform well but never get the ‘win’.Collaboration is a much healthier and more sustainable approach where employees understand their shared responsibility in helping a company achieve its goals.
Peer-to-peer recognition
At Pluxee UK, we’re a big advocate of peer recognition. Our ROAR platform enables employees to recognise one another, and at the end of each month, an independent panel selects three winners.
Peer-to-peer recognition encourages collaboration and camaraderie, creating a positive working environment.
Values-based recognition
ROAR is all about values, and our reward categories align with them. It’s never just about numbers and big wins – though we celebrate those, too – but a sense of belonging. In a high-performing culture, employees will buy into your company values. Secure their commitment by rewarding employees based on behaviours, not just results. Values-based recognition also creates a more inclusive and holistic way of rewarding and redefining performance.
A focus on future skills
Even if your business meets the criteria to wear the ‘high-performance culture’ badge, it’s vital to look to the future. What’s next? How will the industry evolve? What skills will you need, and what will exceptional employee performance look like ten years from now?
Ensure you map out clear development pathways and identify the talent that you can help mould and develop into potential leaders in the years to come.
Empower
You can’t reach the empowerment stage without planting the seeds in the enable and encourage stage. Empowerment may need to come from within, but the employer must take specific steps to make it possible.
Inclusivity
We’ve already discussed the importance of DEI and psychological safety, but another way to position inclusivity is in terms of openness and transparency in the decision-making process. As Cheryl Schuberth, Strategic Partner in Operational Leadership, High-Performing Teams & Scalable Systems, says...
Allowing space for all the voices to come in and spark the conversations that really matter can be a difference maker in how well teams perform.
Growth mindset
We use the term 'growth mindset' to describe individuals who understand that they can acquire new abilities through hard work and that their beliefs may change when presented with new information. To put it more bluntly, things aren’t set in stone, and the only limitations in life are those we set for ourselves.
Employers can encourage their workforce to adopt a growth mindset by nurturing a culture of learning, rewarding those who participate, and encouraging others to seek opportunities to better themselves.
Agility
The word ‘agile’ has become a favourite in business lingo. It reflects the ability to move at pace, quickly adapt to changes, and respond to industry trends and economic shifts. Agility can’t happen without some freedom and flexibility in ways of working, empowering a responsive, proactive, and high-performing culture.
Engage
There are different ways to approach engagement. There’s engagement that relates to how invested your employees are in your business, something that reward, recognition, and wellbeing support will help build. Then, there’s engagement in the sense of how leaders and managers engage with their employees.
Leadership
It’s often said that people don’t quit a business; they quit a manager. The effectiveness of your managers can make or break employee performance, so investing in their training and development is invaluable.
Cheryl goes on to say that…
One of the failures of many leadership teams’ approach is that they don’t allow the high performers to be involved with strategy development, which creates a sense of ownership and ignites innovation.
Employee rewards
We’ve discussed the importance of recognition. Employee rewards add weight to your recognition strategy, whether they’re financial, like eVouchers or a Pluxee Card or non-financial, as we discuss in our blog, ‘11 Examples of Non-Financial Rewards for Employees’.
Wellbeing solutions
Employees are more engaged with and loyal to a business that supports their wellbeing. Improving employee wellbeing brings business benefits, including reduced absenteeism and higher retention rates, which help to nurture a healthy and productive workforce.
Learn more about our employee wellbeing solutions:
Build a sustainable, future-focused, high-performance culture with Pluxee UK
There’s more than meets the eye when it comes to optimal employee performance. You need to be aware of performance masking and recognition strategies that isolate employees while planning your future people strategy.
Without implementing strategies and tools that make high performance sustainable, achieving outstanding results today may lead to poor results tomorrow.
Sources: Creloaded & Cheryl Schuberth
