How to hold onto your high performing employees, with Fresia Jackson

Damon Klotz

Hi, everyone. It's Damon Klotz, host of the culture first podcast. Before we get started with this episode, I wanted to take a moment to say a big thank you to the 1000s of people who've joined us at our culture first virtual events this year. At this year's events, we've heard from fantastic keynote speakers like Susan Cain, Dillon all caught and Valerie Jarrett. Our team of data scientists and people, scientists were crunching millions of data points to bring the latest research to attendees. And speaking about the research, culture, amp customers learned how our latest products are helping companies close the gender gap for a more equitable employee experience. If you're sitting there saying, hey, Damon, I wanted to see some of that content. Well, don't worry. Our sessions from Culture FIrst APAC and Americas are now available on demand. You can click the link in the episode show notes, or just head to cultureamp.com to learn more. All right, let's get started.

Fresia Jackson

But I think it gets such a bad rap and people are like, Oh, performance management is universally despised. And that's not the case we actually see that your high performers are like acutely aware and keenly interested in your performance management approach.

Damon Klotz

Culture first, culture first, culture first, culture first, culture first culture first, culture first culture first. culture, culture, culture, culture, first culture, culture. Culture first, I'm Damon Klotz, and this is culture first. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the culture first podcast. This podcast is a show for people who believe that a better world of work is possible. And they want to be part of the change required in order to make that a reality. On today's episode, we're going to be looking at some fascinating research that looks at the relationship between employee engagement and performance. To give you some context on the scope of this research, the team here at culture M analyzed over 200,000 employees at 741 companies over two years. That's allowed us to get to the bottom of some pretty interesting questions like, Are the high performers at my company more or less likely to suffer from burnout? How often should a performance conversation take place? As well as trying to work out what type of feedback highly engaged and high performing employees need to be hearing right now? Do they want to be praised? Or do they need constructive feedback? So if you've been pondering any of those questions, you've come to the right place. At the start of the episode, you're going to hear me discuss the issues that I have with many of the clickbait articles written about company culture, where they've written the entire article based on a one time survey from only a couple of 100 employees. What those numerous studies aren't able to do that because of that limited sample size is explored the relationship between engagement and performance for different performance buckets. Our people science and research team are uniquely positioned to do this. Before we get started with this interview, I do have a quick disclaimer for a few episodes ago, you met my colleague, Fresia Jackson. She is the lead researcher here at Culture Amp. And she joins me on the show to lay the foundations on all things data and research, we went back to the very start to the basics to learn about all the different types of data that we're collecting here at culture. And to help listeners understand that process, we actually spoke about how one individual survey response ends up entering the world's largest data lake of employee data, which then allows our team to do some pretty unique research. So if you haven't heard or listened to that episode yet, then I really recommend that you actually pause this one and go back and listen to that episode first. Now, because I've just given you a quick little break, I'm assuming that Eva, you're still here, because you've listened to that episode already. Thank you. Oh, that you've paused and went back and speed listen to that one so that you can join us back here for this research that I was teasing at the start. So now that you've got those foundations in place, let's jump over to my conversation with Fresia to learn what that research has told us. So today on the culture first podcast, we're actually having a return guest Fresia Jackson is back on the culture first podcast to talk all things data or data with me Fresia Welcome back to the show. Data. Thank you for having me. We've already got our first data point in this brand new way So it is data, not data. So you are a recurring guest. We did do an episode earlier this year where we sort of really laid the foundations about how we think about data at Culture Amp, what we have access to. And we got some really amazing feedback from the episode from people in the industry, from our customers, even from campus about how it really helped them get a better understanding on really just like how amazing and complex the amount of data that we have access to is, and just how special it is, which is why I had to get you back on the show, because we have some new data to be discussing. But considering you are a returning guest, I don't need to necessarily do all of the intro questions, but I think it would be remiss of me to not least do a quick checking question. So, Fresia, if I really knew you today, what would I know?

Fresia Jackson

Oh, and you know, I feel gigantic because I'm seven months pregnant and feel like I have a basketball in my uterus.

Damon Klotz

That's a very specific answer for everyone listening. You know, I guess one of the things that we need to do on a podcast is use stories in a way to create visuals for people who are only listening. So I very much appreciate you showing up with that truth and honesty. I personally can't relate to how you're feeling today. But what I can say is that I have just come back off a 31 day kind of road trip in the in the US and Australia speaking at some events in New York and Los Angeles and biggest startup event in Sydney. So I'm very energized from all of the in person stuff. And I'm also very ready to be back in my little podcast studio here.

Fresia Jackson

You're on both sides of that spectrum, probably.

Damon Klotz

I'm I am on both sides, I'm holding two opposite things at the same time. And they're both true. So we're back to talk some brand new data. So if you haven't listened to the first part in this series, I'll put the episode link in the show notes. I think it's really important to sort of get the foundational knowledge about everything that's going on with the culture and data, how much we have access to how we think about getting some of those court terms. Understood. Now what we're going to do is, we're assuming everyone has had a chance to listen to that. Now we're going to actually just focus on a specific set of research. Now we have access to a lot we could research a lot. What are we going to be discussing today?

Fresia Jackson

Yeah, today, we're gonna be talking about the relationship between employee engagement and employee experience with employee performance.

Damon Klotz

Now, I feel like this is probably if I just Googled this, there was a lot of articles or research things like I feel like this is a very click Beatty thing like engagement and performance. What is I guess, specific or unique about what we're looking at right now

Fresia Jackson

And I love being called out like that, because you're totally right. This question is nothing new. If you look at the academic literature, it's everywhere, not only employee engagement and individual performance, but also team and organizational. But what's different is that in those studies, they're typically looking at one company are only a few employees. And when I looked I could the largest study I found was looking at 5000 employees and at Culture Amp has people who have listened to the previous episode. No, you know, we're really in a unique position to have access to so much data in that data lake. And because our product offering includes not only engagement, but also performance, we can really pull from that. What this means is we have a much larger data pool to pull from and can answer much more specific questions. So not just you know, what is the relationship between engagement performance, but what is important to high performers, why are employees may be underperforming? And those questions that are, you know, really only possible at scale. And so in this episode, you'll learn how your culture of feedback may actually be alienating your high performers. You'll learn the surprising reason why your employees may be underperforming and you'll learn what the Pygmalion effect is and how it's stopping you from having more high performers.

Damon Klotz

As a facilitator, I love getting those learnings up front we've told the audience what they're about to learn what I love about this and I think one of my pet peeves working in the HR and workplace culture space for you know, the last decade plus is anytime I pick up like a, you know, a newspaper from around the world like a business newspaper, you see some of these studies, and there is entire articles written about like a survey of 300 employees have now shown that like little lunch on Tuesdays when sitting next to a dog is the thing that your employees need. Oh my Okay. Firstly, I don't know how you found that conclusion. And secondly, 200 employees is not telling you anything. And I don't even know who those 200 are. I love that we have access to this, I guess, because we're combining a whole bunch of different companies together. And we're getting all of these different datasets together. And we're also combining engagement and performance data. I'm sure there was some standardization that had to be done. And there was probably some data cleanup that had to get done. So for anyone who was like, really into this object and wants to know how we ended up with this specific set, what can you tell them?

Fresia Jackson

Yeah, I won't go too far, because I think that's probably not most people. I could talk about it, right, we

Damon Klotz

do have some people listening, we have some real people listening.

Fresia Jackson

So yes, it was a lot of work. So we had to go into every single performance rating scale. And interestingly, what we found was that over half of our customers are using a performance rating scale that's completely unique to them. So that was one thing that was interesting. And we looked at 800 scales. And so what we had to do was look at not only the label, but also the distribution, because we really wanted to like hone in on, you know, high performers, low performers, those extreme buckets. And when we looked at the distribution, we saw that companies have one very different ways of assessing performance. But also there are definitely organizations that had problems with leniency bias. So meaning that over 50% of their employees were considered high performers, which there's probably, like, that's just not possible. So we were also removing those companies where we saw that there's, there's not a likelihood that you really have that many high performers. And so what we're doing was looking at label and the distribution, and we were able to standardize the rating scales of 741 companies, and over 200,000 employees. And we did that into a four point scale. So the ones were those that were underperforming twos were meeting expectations, so they're solid performers, threes, we're consistently exceeding expectations. We could say good performers, and then fours, we're setting a new standard, these are truly the highest performers. And in general, that was only about four to 8% of an organization's population.

Damon Klotz

I'm sitting here trying to like picture someone listening who's going, Oh, my God, I work at a company where like, everyone has been told they're a high performer. And it's like, it's actually not that useful. If they're like, you know, congratulations, 90% of everyone was just like, amazing this year. And then I'm sure there's someone listening is also like, oh, yeah, we like deeply customized our performance system down to like an absolute, like, so specific that I'm not even sure if we could have made this research. But I think what you were able to show is that, while it makes sense to customize it for the culture that you have, it doesn't mean that there isn't some level of standard that we can at least look at when it comes to research like this.

Fresia Jackson

Exactly. And some companies had the opposite issue, right? There was only like 1% of people that were considered high performers. And they were like, well, everyone's performing. And maybe that's true. Or maybe they just have very high standards. And that's not a problem either.

Damon Klotz

I'm starting to think about all of my friends in Silicon Valley, who work at some of those really intense companies where the bar is so high that I'm like, I wonder if they're any of those companies. But we are not here to guess which companies are performing which performance rating scale. That is not what this is about. We're looking at large buckets of research here. So I guess when you have to go through this process, and why I wanted to kind of explain some of this up front is that like, you know, those click Beatty articles saying like engagement and performance equals this don't really tell you anything about the process anything about the research that was done. I guess, when you're going through this process of trying to standardize, you're probably going to be learning some things about you know, what's happening with different companies and in their approaches. So throughout that process, was there anything surprising that you found that you wanted to share?

Fresia Jackson

Yes, yeah. So one thing we found was, I think most people would assume that more performance discussions are always better, right? Like we constantly hear about the importance of continuous feedback. And as a byproduct of this research, you know, what we had was a company's performance approach, and we had their employees perceptions of that approach. And so we looked at the cadence of performance discussion. So comparing whether that formal discussion happen when Once a year, twice a year, quarterly, or more than that, more than, like, for example, every other month, and we looked at how employees felt about that. So looking at their if their job performance was evaluated fairly if their manager shows an interest in their career aspirations, if the right people are being recognized and rewarded, and then if people are being held accountable. And what we found was for every single one of those, the sweet spot was actually four times a year, or once a quarter. And in fact, employees that went through an annual performance review, which everyone is like, that's the worst thing you can do is an annual performance review, they actually had higher perceptions of things like their job being performance being evaluated fairly than those who did it every two months. So that was a real surprise to me. And then once I thought about it for a little bit, it did make sense that if you're getting feedback from your manager in a formal discussion before, like, before you feel like you've had a chance to act on it, right to digest it, act on it, and they're telling you it again, that would be quite frustrating.

Damon Klotz

Yeah, and even just like the idea of every two months, I could feel like something like recency bias will be popping in because you're doing it so often that like, you're like, oh, okay, well, like what did the person do last week? Because I have to do this, like checking conversation every, you know, eight or so weeks. So it's kind of like it'll versus you know, doing a reflection every quarter or even once a year really forces you to go Oh, right, over this calendar period, like, where did we start? Where did we get to what were some highlights? What were some key projects, what was some opportunities, and then you combine that with other pieces of feedback that you have? So yeah.

I'm not advocating for once a year, but just showing that in comparison to a more continuous, actually, a quarterly process seemed to be the best. And that does not mean that you should withhold feedback, until you have those performance discussions, any sort of performance discussion that should not feedback should not come as a surprise there. Right? Like there should still be those ad hoc processes of I just did a presentation and asking, What could I do better? You know, getting that feedback in the moment as well. But the structured process, more times is not always better.

Damon Klotz

Love that. So again, I'm sure there's some people listening who are like, Okay, well, we need to relook at everything that we're doing here, whether they're doing it every two months, or once a year. So find that sweet spot. And then, yeah, you know, at the end of the day, we all want to make sure that our job performance is being evaluated fairly, that our manager is showing an interest in our career aspirations that we're feeling recognized, and the right people are being recognized. And, and you know, I think a culture first company is definitely one where, you know, people who are underperforming. Also, not only are they being held accountable, but personally like trying to understand why I'm trying to learn about what's happening and

supporting them. I think that's something we'll talk about later, hopefully.

Damon Klotz

Yeah. And, you know, I think that is one of the areas that I guess after people look at some of this data inside of their organization, they might typically want to start splitting out personas, you know, they might have the persona of the high performers. And they might be spending a lot of time working out. What are they doing and trying to study them? And then, you know, obviously, you also need to be supporting people who haven't been able to reach that performance level and understand why. What did you find when it comes to maybe splitting out some of those personas and, you know, a company spending more time focusing on one versus the other?

Fresia Jackson

Oh, that's a great question. So we did find, and that has to do with the Pygmalion effect that I said people would find out about later. So the Pygmalion effect was coined by a study by Rosenthal and Jacobson in the 1960s. And basically, at the beginning of a school year, they told the teachers, which students were the brightest in the class. And eight months later, when they tested those students, they were the brightest in the class. But there was only one catch, those students had been completely randomly selected. So what this showed was that, you know, the way the expectations that the teachers had of those students changed the way that they interacted with those students, which changed the support that they were given and ultimately impacted the students future performance. And we see the same thing happens with performance rating. So once an employee is rated as a high performer, they see really large improvements in many areas. And let me take a step back to say that we followed these individuals across two years. So we were able to see how it changed over time once they were rated. And we see that these high performers kind of become the apple of their managers, I and they're given even more support than the others. And from the organizational side, they're given many more development opportunities. And I understand why companies do that, because they're using it kind of as a reward. But the problem is that you're good performers are not, you know, those ones who are consistently in the consistently exceeds expectations, but aren't yet considered high performers, they aren't in the top top bucket, they're in the one right below. They're not giving equal development opportunities, despite the fact that they would benefit even more from them. And so by using development as a reward for high performers, these companies are inadvertently widening that gap between their highest performers, and their good performers making it more difficult to kind of attain that status.

Damon Klotz

There's, like so much here, like my brain is exploding, like the idea of this, because, you know, I've seen, you know, presentations in the past where they've even I think, used, like the Armed Forces as an example, where basically, they've just randomly told like, you are in the highest performing group over here, and you are not, and the effect that has had on those people over the, you know, the course, when they just made it up, there was like nothing that said that they were high performer or not.

Fresia Jackson

Yeah, and with managers, we actually saw a, a linear decline. So the lowest performers have the lowest perceptions of their managers, you know, the second, second, lowest, third, third, lowest, and the high performers have the highest. And that's true across these questions that have a direct impact on someone's performance. So for example, my manager sets a clear strategy to achieve our goals. There is a 25% difference in favourability, which is someone agreeing to that question between the low performers and the high performers. We see a similar 14% difference in my manager gives me useful performance feedback. And the same when it comes to the manager understanding the challenge and blockers the teams face. So if your manager doesn't give you feedback, if they don't help you with a strategy to achieve your goals, and they aren't able to help you remove blockers, how are you expected to perform? It's a self fulfilling prophecy.

Damon Klotz

Oh, okay. Oh, my, I'm having many brain explosions, on this early morning here in Australia, while chatting to you. Okay, so I want to, I want to go back to high performers for a second. And I guess the impact or rather, the expectations that they might have. So, you know, if you are someone who has identified as a high performer, and you want to work at a high performance company with a high performance culture, and you just like, you know, you have these high expectations about like, who you are, where you work, and what the environment needs to be. Was there anything that we were learning about the companies about how high performers work? And maybe what they expect from the organization?

Fresia Jackson

Yeah, yeah, they are definitely unique. So overall, we found that high performers really expect a high performance culture. So if I take a step back and explain, first, how we define engagement at Culture Amp is we ask five questions. And it's looking at basically the level of enthusiasm and commitment that someone has for the organization. And so we ask how motivated they are to go go beyond what they would in a similar role elsewhere. So that's kind of the motivation piece, we look at if they're proud to work there. And if they would recommend the company as a great place to work that's like an advocacy piece. And then we look at that commitment piece with two questions. I rarely think about looking for a job at another company. And I see myself still working at the company in two years time. So so much of performance is related to that motivation piece. And when we looked at motivation, and what's correlated to someone saying, they feel more motivated at this company than they would in a role elsewhere, what we see is that for everyone, belonging and the company contributing to their development is pretty equally important. It's very important. But there's one thing that's only important for high performers, and that's that the people around them give constructive feedback. This was even more important than belonging even more important than development. And for every other performance bucket, it was not important. It wasn't even in the top 50 most important questions, but it was number one for high performers.

Damon Klotz

So I guess it just shows that like, not only do they have that high expectation of themselves, they have the high expectation of other people around them, also giving them feedback in order for them to, like, keep improving. They're like, keep telling me ways to improve. And it's kind of like maybe they, you know, if I'm making an assumption here, it's like, they feel like they can belong anywhere with a high performance culture, but they what they really want is like people telling them like, Hey, this is how you get like, 1%, better, 5% better, 10% better. So they're constantly, in some ways, creating a feedback culture around them. Yeah,

Fresia Jackson

yeah, there's an insatiable need for like, continuous improvement and development, through that constructive feedback, specifically. And I think that's important to note, because so many companies say, Oh, we're really focused on creating a culture of feedback, but they only do it halfway. And what that creates is just a culture of praise. And that would be uniquely alienating for your high performers, because they want that constructive feedback piece. And that takes a lot more practice and a lot more psychological safety to be able to ask and receive for that, that constructive feedback.

Damon Klotz

So if we've got this picture of this high performing, like feedback, magnet person operating inside an organization, and they're just like, this is, you know, this the expectations they have for themselves that the company that culture, their leader, that sounds tiring, even just saying it out loud, just this constant, like I am at 110%. Not that that's statistically possible. But I am just so amazing. And we look at all this feedback. And I'm always like, okay, like, that's tiring, is, is there anything we learned about high performers and well being? Are they so engaged and so high performing that they don't even care about well being? Or are we seeing anything when it comes to how they replenish themselves and things like burnout?

Fresia Jackson

I think you are psychic time on because they are lowest on some of the wellbeing questions like being able to accomplish what they need to during normal working hours, 16% difference, and they're also lowest on being able to switch off from work. So those are two very important things, right? When it comes to well being, how long you're working. And if you're still thinking about work after you're working, but their highest on a question we have about finding the pace of work, energizing. So they're like, yeah, all I do is work and I love it. So there seems to be a little bit a small dose of workaholism there. But when it comes to being committed to the organization, so those two questions I talked about earlier, I rarely think about looking for a job in another company. And I see myself still working at the company in two years time, what we find is that for high performers, more than any other performance bucket, having access to resources for coping with stress, and receiving support from those around them, are even more important for them committing to the organization for the long haul. So it seems like they recognize that the way that they're working isn't the most sustainable, and that they're going to need additional resources to keep them from burning out.

Damon Klotz

So I guess that's a really good call out for managers. You know, there is benefit from having people in an organization for longer periods of time, from the ability to mentor others to sharing knowledge to Becoming You know, things like a, you know, culture carrier, someone who can, you know, teach other employees about what it's like to work there. You know, what we don't want is an environment where we can only, like, bring in these high performers for like, one year, have them go like amazing results. But then just like, you know, burnout or stress. So, like, yep, we want people who want to achieve, we want people who want to take on feedback. But also we also need to make sure that there is some of those support mechanisms around them. Because I'm sure you know, we'd all like to be able to keep this high performance for a longer period of time. So we get some of the wider benefits of it the individual as opposed to just the task related performance that you might get. They're only there for something like 12 months. Yeah,

Fresia Jackson

yeah. And we actually see this play out in the data. That performance is transient, because when we followed employees over one year to see how their rating changed, we found that for the solid and good performers, they were more likely to stay the same. That was the most likely thing to happen over that year. But for high proof ormers they were most likely to decline. So it's really difficult to stay in that high performance mindset for a long period. And then on the other extreme, we actually found that if a low performer is still at the organization, within one year, seven out of 10 of them actually improve within that year to be a solid performer.

Damon Klotz

So yeah, I guess that's even a on the flip side, you know, looking past that 12 months for that employee, right. So, you know, what else can we do to support them? And I guess, you know, we spoke about, I guess, the, the importance of well being for a high performer and also, you know, supporting them inside of the organization. I think anyone who's been working over the last few years has known that the external environment has had a massive impact on how, like, how we've worked, where we're working, maybe even what we're working on, many organizations have had to pivot products or industries or things. So if someone is underperforming, you know, was there anything we were able to learn about maybe things outside of their direct role, or external reasons why they might be happening?

Fresia Jackson

Well, it's funny that you say outside of their direct role, because the first thing we found that is that they might be in the wrong role. When we looked at, we follow those employees through to exit to identify which questions were most predictive. Generally, we always find those two commitment questions to be the most predictive. But that was different for the underperformers. So instead, the question I'm happy with my current role, relative to what was described to me, was even more predictive than I rarely think about looking for a job at another company, and they respond much less favorably to this question. So that's the first thing, it might not be that it's inherent to the individual. It's actually they're just in the wrong role completely. And another thing we found was that when we looked at performance longitudinally, so what we did was we identified employees who improved between one performance review cycle and another. And then we looked back to see how had their employee engagement survey responses changed between those two? And what we found was the most predictive question was pretty unsurprising. It was I know what I need to do to be successful in my role. So those that improved in this question, were much more likely to go up in our performance rating during the next review period. And vice versa, those that decline were much more likely to see a decline in performance rating. And I think both of these things sound obvious, like people should be in the right role. And they should know what's expected of them and what success looks like. But we know particularly when an organization is growing, we did research that was published in our culture Crunch Report, looking at, you know, what changes as an organization grows rapidly. And one of the things is role clarity, knowing what you need to do to be successful. And I think many organizations forget that key component, during times of change, things like restructuring, that's a moment where employees often don't know what success looks like, in their role. And so by watching that question, or something similar, you might be able to stave off performance issues.

Damon Klotz

So I guess one of the things that I really heard there was that we'd be low performers. Yes, the external environment might be chaotic, there might be lots of uncertainty and lots of change, there is many things within the scope of their role that you can, you know, provide greater clarity. And greater, you know, I guess we're getting really specific about what performance looks like, what is your current role? What is the role scope, and that was actually one of my kind of 2022, like, top 10 topics I wanted people to be thinking about, we did a series at the start of this year, and one of them was actually to do a bit of a role reset, like, look at how has someone's job changed over the last few years? Have you actually updated what their role description is, to that? Are their goals actually matched to that, you know, is any of the structural things around it because there'd be nothing worse than having, you know, someone who's like, I just spent 12 months really thinking I was doing amazing, and none of the structural pieces of how their performance or their goals that were measured, were updated. So that person thinks that they've done a great job, and then their performance system fails them, because their manager can't actually, you know, be able to say, Well, according to this, you did,

Fresia Jackson

yeah. And they don't have something to look back on to say, okay, am I doing my top priorities right? So this is a completely different study, but we just finished it. So you're getting a sneak break, breaking news, we looked at all of the inspirations in our inspiration engine. So that's basically a collection of ideas of what organizations can do to improve different parts of the employee experience. And when we compared all of these inspirations, the number one inspiration that had the largest impact was role narratives, which sounds so simple, but on average, companies improved 26% in favor ability by implementing role narratives around you know, the employee understanding what their role was, as well as holding others accountable. So it seems like it's not only for the individual, but also for others around them to be aware of, you know, who do I go to for XYZ, right? That's very difficult as an organization grows.

Damon Klotz

26 Yes, that is, okay. So like, from a people's minds perspective, just to give some people who, you know, like, what is statistically significant in terms of a percentage increase that gets you going? Well?

Fresia Jackson

Well, it depends on how many employees we're looking at. So there's a lot of things to take into account, what's the standard deviation, all of that, um, but I would say, pass like 5%, or like, oh, that's like, that's different. 26 is insane. And it was something so simple, like, I think our inspiration engine, we're always like, Oh, what's the most novel thing, roll narratives was not one of those most novel things, but it's just so basic and important. And organizations are often not doing that, that basic piece or doing it like you mentioned right, at the beginning, when someone starts a role, but not on a continuous basis and updating it.

Damon Klotz

So if you listen to the first episode, you know, we spent a lot of time with Aquatic themed metaphors of things like data, lakes, and data buckets. So a big takeaway here, from that little, you know, not little that massive difference is, so many organizations spent all their time focusing on new people into their business, you know, brand new role descriptions, making sure that they're set up for success, the onboarding, there's potentially this gigantic leaky bucket inside of every organization. And then all it might take is a reset conversation about role clarity, role scope, what are you currently working on? Does it match, like, we all grow and change and like many of us, are not going to be doing the exact same role that we were hired for, like, even if our we got promoted into a new role doesn't always mean that everything carries with us, it doesn't always mean that those things get updated. So, you know, and again, this is one of those things where we get to say things like this on a podcast, like just do this and you're like, Oh, thanks, Damon. And Fresia, we have 19,000 employees at our company. And that will take us 10,000 years in order to get everyone's, but you can break it down. You know, a manager can start having these conversations you can you can partner with your people team to go, what would it look like to see if one department did a role, clarity, exercise? And then look at the data? If you did it just for marketing? How does marketing change if everyone gets real clarity, or finance or whatever? So I think there's some really nice, you know, actionable things that people can start doing here.

Fresia Jackson

Yeah, run your own experiment. We'd love to hear about it. Yeah, send

Damon Klotz

us, send us your results. And you might be featured on a future podcast episode. So, you know, we've discussed how your culture of feedback can be potentially alienating your highest performance. We've also spoke about the surprising reason why your employees may be underperforming, and the Pygmalion effect and my head exploding emoji about how all the ways I've seen that play out, in my experience over the years, was there any other I guess, sort of takeaways, or, you know, like, you and your entire team spent so much time looking at this data? Is there anything else that you were like, I need to make sure that listeners kind of understand this relationship between employee engagement and employee performance?

Fresia Jackson

There's two actually, yes. So many things, right. Well, one is how important the performance management process is. And of course, you're like, Well, yeah, you have a tool that does performance management. But But I think it gets such a bad rap. And people are like, Oh, performance management is universally despised. And that's not the case. We actually see that your high performers are like acutely aware and keenly interested in your performance management men approach because we found that when it comes to advocating for the company which is you're proud to work there, and you would recommend it to others. Everyone has to have confidence in the leaders like that's the most important thing. What's unique to high performers is three questions around performance management. So one is that performance reviews focused on quality and improvement. The second is that performance standards are consistently applied. And then that bias is minimized in performance reviews. And so I think this really shows that they are having an outsized impact on the organization, and they want to know that they themselves or anyone that they refer to the company would be recognized for that impact. So that kind of goes into the whole high performance, expect performance culture, but one of the ways to do that is through your performance management approach. And then the second one is, performance is transient, right, we already talked about, especially for the extremes. And I'm not sure it's reasonable, actually, to expect someone to be a high performer forever. Like sometimes there are seasons of sacrifice, and then you need to rejuvenate. And one of the metaphors that I love that our CO GA talks about is the peloton, which is the biking structure, not the Viking organization, which is when someone is leading the peloton, they're taking the brunt of the force of drag, right and they make an easy one easier for everyone else who's in their slipstream behind them. And you can't stay in the front for very long, you have to cycle in and out so that you can rejuvenate. And also so that, you know you can take on the front to give her a proof to others. And I think more organizations need to allow for that cyclical nature of performance and support employees through the waves of performance that come along.

Damon Klotz

I love that we just because someone's a low performer right now doesn't mean that we should expect that they can't have a chance to also play a different role within their peloton, just because that they're at the back doesn't mean that they can't play, get to the middle or even be in front. And just because you're in front, there is absolutely no expectation that that person should be leading from the front for the entire race. And, you know, obviously, you and I have been at Culture Amp for several years, between us, we've seen the growth of the company from you know, a handful of employees to now over 1000 employees. And I think we've seen that metaphor play out, both at our company, as well as other startups is that, you know, a startup can't go from 10 employees to 1000 with the same first 10 Being out front the entire time, we all need to find, you know, ways that we can contribute across the journey ways that we can be the high performers and take others on that journey. You know, look at the role clarity, change roles and adapt. And I think this is a really important reminder, especially, you know, we're recording this towards the end of the year, I'm sure many people are looking at kind of their quarterly performance reviews and end of year wrap ups and like, you know, role clarity moving forward, this is a great time to be thinking about these things, you know, what about your environment needs to change? What about your role structure and clarity needs to change? How are you supporting employees who are at the high level right now? And also, how are you giving greater understanding and clarity to those who aren't high performing so that they can have a chance and you know, that same environment in order to get there. So I think this is a really timely conversation.

Fresia Jackson

Yeah, the New Year is always a good time to put new things in place.

Damon Klotz

Well, this is been a fascinating conversation. So like I said, you know, we are going to be looking at some of the this research that we have access to we have an incredible research team. And, you know, one of our goals at Culture Amp is to make sure that we're putting out all of this amazing research so that you're not going to some, you know, very large newspaper reading a study about 14 employees in the middle of nowhere, who's telling you what the relationship between engagement and performance. So, Frasier, if people want to find out more information about some of this research or read any other parts of our research, where should they be going to?

Fresia Jackson

Yes, we publish this as a three part blog series. So if you are listening along and you're like, I wish I had a visual to go with what Fresia was just describing there are beautiful visualizations and graphs. So head over to the Culture Amp blog, and I always am posting them on LinkedIn as well. So feel free to follow me Fresia Jackson.

Damon Klotz

one more plug alert. I need like a little button that I can, I can click. This has been amazing. For anyone who's been a longtime listener of the culture first podcast, you know that I very rarely sit here and talk about culture and products. But the reason why that we're talking about, you know, our engagement and performance products is because we have this incredible data. And we have so many amazing data scientists and people, scientists and people who are sitting here crunching the numbers to really find these anecdotes so that they can help you build a culture first company. So for you just want to say a big shout out to you joining maybe give a shout out to the team and everyone who's able to bring this research to life.

Fresia Jackson

Yes, absolutely. A shout out to Winnie Yep, who is our lead data scientist, Lisa xao, who is our data analyst, Vivian Wu, who is an incredible brain trust for me. And then Kelly luck, who helps me turn these ideas into beautiful writing. Thank you to everyone. And the design team, turns it into beautiful visualizations.

Damon Klotz

And the 1000 Plus culture and employees who support every single organization that were you know, that allows us to bring all of this data or data because I'm trying to be inclusive of all the different data's out there. So, Fresia, thanks so much for joining me once again on the culture first podcast.

Fresia Jackson

Thanks for having me. Always happy to come back and nerd out with some more.

Damon Klotz

I'm sure there will be demand to have you back. Again. So. A big thank you to Fresia for joining me once again, on the culture first podcast. Hopefully, this episode answered some of those questions that you have about the relationship between your most highly engaged employees and the high performers. And also what you can do to help change the scenario for employees who aren't in one of those categories. What do your employees need in order to make sure that the environment is one where they can feel really highly engaged, highly motivated, as well as looking at all of the internal and external factors that might be impacting their performance right now, and the role that you can play to help those employees reach those levels? If you're sitting there, and you're saying, You know what, I've got some questions. And I want to know if there's some research or if there's some data out there. And maybe you're a reader of the people, Gately newsletter that comes out every week from Culture Amp or you love our blog, where we actually showcase some of this data. If it's something that you've read, or if it's a question that you've got, and you're like, you know what, I'd love for day one to see whether we can do you know an episode on that or interview someone you know, that's written some of those pieces, then please just reach out to me and let me know. I would love to make sure that whatever questions you have about building a better world of work are things that we can answer here on the culture first podcast. So definitely please reach out on any of the social media channels. I'm at Damon Klotz on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, wherever you can find me. I would love to hear from you. If you've enjoyed this episode, and you haven't left a review or subscribe yet, then what are you waiting for? The more followers subscribers and reviews that we get on the show. Every little one of those pieces helps us reach more people who can learn and be inspired to create a better world of work. That's a pretty lofty mission that we have here at Culture Amp. And this podcast is just one of the ways to share stories to create that better world work that we all want to be part of. I've been your host, Damon Klotz and culture first is brought to you by the team here at Culture Amp, the world's leading employee experience platform. Learn more about Culture Amp by heading to CultureAmp.com and tell them that the podcast sent you. Thank you for listening and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day.