What's new in Perform: Connecting strategy with real results

It's a demanding moment to be in HR. The pace of transformation, increasingly tight budgets, and the pressure to maximize output – without burning employees out – are keeping HR professionals and people leaders up at night. AI tools offer some support, but a company’s competitive advantage won’t come from technology alone. It will come from how effectively your people can adapt to change while maintaining high performance standards over time.

And here's the catch. Ask most leaders whether their company sets goals, runs reviews, and supports employee development, and you'll get a confident yes. Ask whether those things actually drive performance, and the room tends to go quiet.

That gap between going through the motions and getting real results is where most performance strategies quietly stall – feedback loses its impact, and good intentions never quite fuel momentum.

Culture Amp’s latest Perform updates are built to close that gap. We've added strategic clarity with cascading and weighted goals, operational consistency with probation reviews, and expert, in-the-moment coaching for employees during performance reviews and development planning with an expanded version of AI Coach.

Here's what's new.

Connect strategy to everyday work with Goals

Most teams have goal-setting down. What’s holding them back is that they’re not connecting those goals to strategy and to each other. Strategy often sits in a leadership deck or an intranet page; goals live somewhere else entirely, and the line between them is invisible – so the priorities that should be obvious to everyone… aren't. Holding it all together has meant working off-platform, usually in spreadsheets. Now these connections live inside Culture Amp.

With cascading goals, every goal carries a clear line of sight from company strategy down to the day-to-day work that supports it, and progress updates automatically. Leaders get an always-on view of whether the organization is genuinely moving on what matters. Employees can see where their work fits, and why it counts.

Cascading goals trace a clear line from company strategy to daily work - and weighted percentages reflect what matters most

For organizations with a more mature goal-setting culture, weighted supporting goals add a further layer of clarity. Not every goal carries equal weight, so progress percentages can now roll up in a way that reflects your top priorities instead of a flat average that treats your most and least important goals as equal.

Set employees up for success with Probation reviews

The first few months in a role are a high-stakes review window for a new employee and their manager. It's where expectations are set, support takes shape, and early signals reveal what will help someone succeed. Getting probation right can pay off for years.

Yet for many HR teams, the probation review lives somewhere else entirely – in a separate system, cut off from the goals, feedback, and development that tell the rest of an employee's story.

Set probation reviews once: new hires are enrolled automatically, with self-reflection and manager review templates grounded in people science guidance

Probation reviews bring it all together. The most important early review now sits in the same connected experience as the rest of performance: New hires receive structured, consistent feedback at the milestones that matter, managers are prompted through each step without juggling tools or tracking dates manually, and HR configures the setup once with the confidence that nothing will slip through the gaps between systems in the future.

The payoff is simple. The habits and rhythms that drive good performance are established from day one, the employee experience is handled consistently and effectively, and the feedback they receive early on connects to everything that follows.

Give every employee a thought partner with AI Coach

Coaching in the moment: AI Coach guides development planning - grounded in each employee’s own strengths, motivators and performance signals

Writing about performance can be one of the most challenging exercises for an employee, whether it’s an honest self-reflection, constructive feedback for a colleague, or a development plan that maps to competency frameworks, identifies gaps, and genuinely stretches their skills.

Now, AI Coach shows up in those moments. Grounded in people science and each employee's unique performance signals, AI Coach now provides guidance across:

• Self-reflections: Helps employees articulate their impact and growth, so the reflection at the heart of their review is sharper and more thoughtful.
• Peer and upward feedback: Supports giving honest, balanced feedback that's genuinely useful to the person receiving it.
• Development planning: Assists in building a development plan based on real strengths, motivators, and growth areas, mapped to the individual’s competencies and career path.

And there's a deeper benefit. AI Coach doesn't do the thinking for people – it coaches them to think more clearly, reflect more deeply and strengthen their communication. Guided to assess their growth honestly against their own performance signals rather than a gut feel, employees produce reflections and plans with real impact. Managers get richer, more thoughtful input to coach from and a model for what good coaching looks like in practice. HR sees more consistent, considered contributions across the whole cycle. And good coaching stops being a matter of who you report to and becomes something every employee can access.

When coaching compounds

Apart, these are three helpful moments of support. Together, they're a system. The thinking AI Coach builds in a self-reflection carries into the feedback an employee gives, into the development plan they write, and into the conversations they have with their manager – each moment raising the standard of the next. That's the difference between a feature that helps one person write one thing better, and a layer of coaching that quietly raises how an entire organization reflects, gives feedback, and grows.

Drive sustainable high performance with a unified performance system

What's true of coaching is true of the whole system. Goals, reviews, development, and feedback were never meant to work in isolation. They were built to reinforce each other – a development plan built from real performance signals, a self-reflection grounded in last quarter's goals, and priorities set at the top that stay legible all the way down.

High performance comes from cultural systems paired with small, daily habits that compound over time. Together, our latest Perform updates are the connective tissue that builds a Peak Performance culture.

This is what it means for culture to be your operating system – the connective layer that aligns your people, your decisions, and your performance. Culture Amp is that CultureOS: an always-on layer that turns everyday signals into better decisions, and better decisions into durable high performance.

What’s new this quarter, at a glance