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The New Year resolutions your business should be making to help build a High-Performance Culture in 2021!

23rd December 2020
By Jade Tomassi

A new year, a new beginning. I think that is what many of us are hoping as we bid farewell to 2020 and walk into 2021 with an element of hope for the future! A new year is a great time to reflect on your business, what is working and what is not, and create goals for the coming year.

We are going to talk about the best resolutions your company should make, to help build a high-performance culture at your organisation.

A High-Performance Culture can be defined as a set of behaviours and norms that helps lead organisations to achieve greater success and financial gain.

However, before they can begin to influence performance, organisations need to truly understand their people, teams, values and work practices.

Define your company values

Values underpin company culture and describe the behaviours we exhibit as a team and what is important to us. Values are not just feel-good catch phrases; they are an integral part of the framework we use in our day-to-day interactions.

If you have not already, take some time to think about what your company stands for, what its values should be, and how to ensure your team aligns to those values. (Watch our webinar on trust and team alignment to find out more).

Even if you have your company values outlined, take some time to review them with your team. Could they be improved? Do you values motivate your team?

If you are interested in ours, you should read our recent blog discussing the power of values.

Ditch the annual performance reviews and replace with a ‘continuous dialogue’ approach

The biggest issues with annual performance reviews lies in the fact that they are retrospective. The trend to move away from annual reviews is gathering pace, with more and more global organisations like Deloitte already ditching this process.

However, it does leave a void in employee, manager and organisational communication and reporting.  For this to work effectively, a process is required where KPIs, goals and objectives for each individual are broken down into milestones, and subject to regular reviews between employees and managers.

Using the right performance management and engagement system, this process can be activated easily to provide real-time capture of how people are tracking against their milestones. The ability to generate real-time reports will enhance the ability to predict performance and deliver greater organisational visibility.

Build resilience

Nowhere is resilience more important than in the workplace. Work can be stressful, change can be inevitable (thank you 2020!), and we are not always masters of our own destiny.  Change interferes with the autonomy of individuals by making them feel as though they have lost control. Building personal resilience and helping colleagues and employees to do the same can help make change feel more manageable.

Employers can only control so much. However, organisational culture plays a large part in the health and well-being of employees and is something that really can be controlled.

Culture can be found in the relationships, communication, behaviours, and interactions across organisations. To nurture a healthy organisational culture, it is important to understand how secure employees feel to show their true selves, take risks, and openly converse.

This is often called psychological safety, and an important element when it comes to team performance as well as being closely interwoven with resilience.

At work, developing a collective resilience amongst employees and offering coping strategies to deal with stress management, makes it easier to adapt to periods of high pressure and disruption.

Increase diversity

Diversity is so much more than just someone’s race or ethnic background. It is the rich tapestry of characteristics and everything else that makes a person who they are. Individuals have varied work styles, abilities, and disabilities, as well as different cultures, generations and economic or educational backgrounds. Employers should recognise the many strengths and talents that diversity brings to their organisations.

Here are a few reasons why we think diversity is important:

  • It nurtures mutual respect within a workforce.
  • Recognised and well-managed teams that are aware of their own diversity can work better and tackle problems together in less time.
  • It fosters creativity and innovation
  • It helps to improve employee retention (when employees feel valued for their individuality, skills, and knowledge)
  • When employees feel included, they are in turn more engaged.

Ensure goals are aligned and create a sense of shared purpose

In a survey by ClearCompany, 97% of employees and executives believe a lack of shared purpose within a team impacts the outcome of a project, and 86% of employees and executives cite lack of collaboration for workplace failures.

The starting point for most people leaders is to be clear about your organisation’s purpose. But once you have you purpose clear, and you are communicating this well internally, how do set, measure, and align your people around this purpose?

Put simply you need to:

  1. Marry your company objectives to goals and actions throughout the organisation, to align activity to your purpose
  2. Review your goal achievements. Quarterly or every six months, you want to have a clear picture of which goals and milestones are being achieved.
  3. Use supplemental data to analyse performance chains. If you have a cascading goals approach, you have the opportunity to add supplementary data like personality types of your people, engagement rates, relationships and communication data (we can help here if you do not have this data). If you have personality information on your people you can understand which personality types achieved which goals. If you have relationship and trust data (which MyPeople generate) you can see whether the depth and quality of relationships impact team goal performance (spoiler alert, they do!).

Find out more here or watch our recent webinar in our Performance series on Goal Alignment

Use data to improve training & development

At every point in the employee journey there are opportunities to increase team performance using data.

In business, we capture huge amounts of data in an employee’s lifecycle; from the recruitment phase, when a new starter begins with the organisation, performance goal setting and promotion & succession planning. However, we do not tend to feed any of this information back into the recruitment or training processes, to improve the rate of development or improve the time it takes new hires to get up to speed.

In sport, data is gathered and used most commonly to try and improve an athlete’s and a team’s performance levels – most of which focuses on development. This tends to take the form of ever more personalised individual development plans. In business we too should be trying to personalise training and development plans, and refine our goals setting approaches.

There are huge team and organisational benefits for tailoring training and development to individuals. Start by building a culture of continuous improvement, with development goals and performance goals for every individual. Then gather data on those goals. What type of goals are being achieved and which are not. Are there demographic factors linked to goal achievement, certain tenures of individuals that are linked to goal achievement?

Finally, you might see patterns of where training is impacting goal achievement, how quickly new hires are hitting 60% of their goals, how quickly newly promoted employees are getting up to speed. This will help you in personalising goals and personalising plans for development in the future.

Once you start this process of analysis you will find you are starting to build a continuous improvement culture, which is a byword for a high-performance culture. You will see how the data that you are already gathering can help improve your training and development approaches.

To find out more, watch our webinar on personalised development plans and how customising these by role, by personality, and what worked for others is possible using data.

Hire based on ‘team-fit’

Getting recruitment right is extraordinarily hard and getting it wrong is expensive.

When recruiting for a role or building a team, there are many assessment tools that help in the recruitment process. Tools that enable us to measure the skills and capabilities of a prospective new teammate – after all, it would be foolish to hire someone without having some confidence that they can do the job.

But beyond being able to do the job, what other factors drive the success of an individual once they join your team?

The biggest one is team fit. Simply, if the new individual does not get on with your team, no matter how capable they are, their motivation will drop, their application will drop and worst-case scenario, they will just leave.

Yet we spend little time assessing team fit with data.

Here are some steps you can take to use data to improve and optimise your recruitment process.

Build Trust

From our heritage in elite sport, we know to build long-term sustainable performance, you need to start by building trust – and we have been right behind many successful teams, measuring and building trust for over 20 years.

Make 2021 your year to focus on building, measuring, and improving trust within your organisation.

Put low trust in a team and everyone fights for themselves. The focus is protection. Create and maintain high trust and you will find that collaboration and growth become the norm.

Want to learn more? Take a look at our YouTube channel that features multiple webinars on the importance of trust and how to build and improve levels of trust.

Changing the culture of an organisation takes time, effort, and commitment. MyPeople software enables you to gather the right data to make informed decisions and build on what you already have, on your way to achieving an excellent High-Performance Culture of your own.

By shining a light on the psychological factors that impact team performance, we enable organisations to advance and leverage their people data, providing the crucial tangible link to operational performance and the bottom line.

Our Team Analytics provide interactive visualisations and business intelligence to support workforce decisions, so organisations can define, align, and transform their people strategies.

Using a developed and proven methodology applied in elite sport, our software has evolved from the marginal gains approach in GB Cycling; the idea that small incremental improvements in teams add up to a significant change in organisational performance.

Designed to address diverse workplace challenges, we deliver the critical insight needed for businesses to sustainably thrive and highlight where teams can grow.

If you would like to find out how to make 2021 your best yet, please get in touch.

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