As workplace pressures rise, how can HR ensure that high staff performance is sustained?
According to research from employee experience platform Culture Amp, published in April 2025, organisations that have high employee engagement have 40% more high-performing employees. Alongside this, high-performing leaders have 4.5 times as many high-performing employees as the average business leader.
These findings raise an important question for HR: how can leaders within organisations create an environment in which employees consistently perform at their best? Start right
According to Alex Alvarez, Culture Amp’s lead people scientist, building a high-performance workforce begins long before an employee’s first day. “It makes sense to start from the beginning when you hire people,” he said. “If a new hire agrees that the role is a good fit for their skills, they are 48% more likely to be a high performer.”
Clear job descriptions and accurate expectations set the groundwork for superior performance, Alvarez added. Beyond hiring, it is about creating an environment that encourages individuals to excel.
David R Blackburn, chief people consultant for GambleAware, and managing director of David R Blackburn Consulting, agreed that identifying and supporting high performers is a continual process. “At every stage, whether someone is moving roles or having a career conversation, you should be gathering insight about unlocking high performance,” he said. Data from one-to-ones, surveys, feedback and psychometric tests can help reveal who is thriving, and why.
Both panellists noted that high performance is rare. Alvarez said that only 10% to 15% of employees in most organisations are rated as high performers, and just 2% maintain that level over multiple review cycles. “High performance is cyclical,” he explained. He added that high performance is linked to the culture and environment of an organisation, and whether leaders can move people into productive cycles.
Strategy, feedback and fairness
Asked what drives consistent excellence, Blackburn pointed to four principles identified in a Harvard University study: clear strategy, operational excellence, agile structure, and a culture that allows all three to thrive. “What does a high-performance culture look like?” he asked, before answering, “doing all of those things”.
For Alvarez, alignment and development are equally important. “High-performing individuals set more goals, and align them with the team,” he said. “Managers can tend to treat high-performing individuals differently, giving them more opportunities to shine. We need to be careful that managers are fair and give opportunities to everyone,” Alvarez added. A sense of belonging, constructive feedback, and clarity about performance expectations all help employees progress from competence to excellence, he suggested.
Trust also plays a crucial role. “Trust is a massive unlocker to high performance,” Blackburn said. “If your engagement surveys are showing low engagement, that will never result in high performance.”
Employees need to have autonomy, mastery, and purpose, he added. “People want what they do to make a difference,” stated Blackburn.
Watch out for burnout
Both panellists warned that high performance must be sustainable. “Productivity is about working smarter, not longer,” Blackburn said. “HR has a role in helping organisations understand that.”
Alvarez agreed, highlighting that high performance for its own sake leads to burnout. Citing Culture Amp’s data, Alvarez added that high-performing individuals find it more difficult to switch off from work, and they find it difficult to get everything done in normal working hours.
He explained that high-performing individuals are often energised by the pace of work. “That tells you there is a little bit of workaholism, and all this leads to burnout.”
Culture Amp’s data shows that the highest performers often report the lowest wellbeing scores. “If you want to sustain high performance,” Alvarez said, “you need to pay attention to the wellbeing side. Otherwise, high performance will not last.”
Blackburn concluded that leadership signals are critical: “The role of the line manager and the organisation is to signal that it is okay to switch off.”
This article was published in the November/December 2025 edition of HR magazine.