Change is the only thing sure in the world, they say, and in the past two years, we are forced to adapt to change with an amazing speed.
Whether we discuss big organizations or few-people teams, resilience quickly becomes part of our vocabulary, and we have the same response: fight-or-flight-or-freeze. But how much adrenaline is too much, and how does this affect us as individuals and employees in our organizations? How do organizations manage and perceive the phenomenon called “The Great Resignation” or “The Great Attrition”?
More than 19 million US workers—and counting—have quit their jobs since April 2021, a record pace disrupting businesses everywhere. This has also affected countries in Europe or Australia and seems to be spreading around the world. Many companies struggle to understand and react, but the reaction is usually disproportionate and sometimes even inappropriate.
What Actually Happened?
If the past 24 months have taught us anything, it’s that employees crave compassion and making work more human. People are not robots with tasks or responsibilities, and more than ever, people need to be seen as imperfect and have the space to feel imperfect. Employees are tired, burnt out, and grieving. During the COVID-19 pandemic, everyone has suffered losses. For some, it’s the loss of loved ones; for others, the loss of familiarity — missed family gatherings or coffee with friends, canceled vacations and postponed events, or going to the office every day. The sources of loss, big and small, influence our work and personal lives.
Now, employees want companies to understand this loss and see a renewed and revised sense of purpose in their work. Employees want to feel a sense of shared identity, of community. Yes, they still want pay, benefits, and perks, but more than that, they want to feel valued by their organizations and managers. They want meaningful—though not necessarily in-person—interactions, not just transactions. Most employees have questioned everything during this period, including the meaning of life and work. What is the new meaning that your organization is willing to offer for work? What is the purpose that your company is offering to your employees? Is your company vision only related to profit, or do you have a higher purpose?
The pandemic brings new opportunities and urgency, and the idea of being agile and always ready to change is very good for business. However, people need time to adjust and make peace with this sense of loss. Indeed, the prolonged levels of uncertainty will only add to the grief and anxiety that employees experience. None of us knows exactly what will and won’t be coming back in a post-pandemic workplace. Therefore, we don’t know yet what is gone for now and what is gone forever. This influences performance or productivity.
What Can We Do?
If companies make a concerted effort to understand why employees are leaving and take meaningful action to gain them back, they can turn things into their favor. By seizing this unique moment of uncertainty and offering meaningful purpose and identity, your company could gain an edge in the race to attract, develop, and retain the talent you need to create a thriving post-pandemic organization.
If you’re a CEO or a member of a top team, your best move now is to hit pause and take the time to think through your next moves. But don’t think through your next moves in a vacuum; include your employees in the process. Start thinking about implementing a performance management system in your organization and do it with the help of your people. If you want to keep people by your side, include them in your plans, include them in setting the performance standards, and show them that their insight is valuable.
As you implement the performance management system at the employee level, ask the following questions:
Do we have a toxic organizational culture? It’s very important to understand if in your organizational culture, you may have missed some points with toxic leaders. This could put people down before even having the chance to perform.
Do we have the right people in the right places (especially managers)? Many employers face the problem of having the right people but not necessarily in the right places. When it comes to managers, this problem can be particularly damaging, especially in hybrid environments, where new leadership skills are required. Skills such as coaching and training capability are very important to develop for managers since in the new reality of work, people need coaching more than ever.
How was our organizational culture before the pandemic? If you think that going back to the office means returning to the same culture, you may expect your people to leave very quickly. You should remember that although the needs of your employees have changed, your culture may not have kept up, and any prior organizational weaknesses are now magnified. Employees will have little tolerance for a return to a status quo they didn’t like before.
Is our organizational culture based on the idea of transaction? If your only response to attrition is to raise compensation, you’re strongly telling your people that your relationship with them is transactional and that their only reason to stay with you is a paycheck. Your talent in the organization will always have a better cash offer somewhere else. Our suggestion is to solve the problems of the whole person (not just their bank accounts) and the whole organization.
Are our benefits aligned with employee priorities? If before the pandemic you offered free parking or Christmas parties as special benefits, you might want to consider adapting and changing these benefits also. In a recent survey among people who left their jobs, 45 percent cited the need to take care of the family as influential in their decision. A similar proportion of people who are thinking of quitting cited the demands of family care. Expanding childcare, nursing services, or other home- and family-focused benefits could help keep such employees from leaving and show that you value them.
Employees want career paths and development opportunities. Can you provide it? Employees are looking for jobs with better, stronger career trajectories. They desire both recognition and development. Smart companies find ways to reward people by promoting them into new roles and into additional levels within their existing ones. This is one way companies can quickly reward and recognize people for good work.
How are we building a sense of community? Remote work is no panacea, but neither is a full on-site return. In-person connectivity continues to have massive benefits for your organization. But it will require considerable management attention to be right as health and safety concerns continue to evolve, particularly because employees’ needs and expectations have changed. For example, employees with unvaccinated young children may feel unsafe in large in-person gatherings.
One organization took an inclusive approach by sending out themed staycation packages: a movie night with popcorn and a gift card; a game night with family-oriented games, chips, and salsa; and a virtual spa day complete with face masks, tea, and chocolate. The company created a Slack channel for posting photos and stories, encouraging employees to share these experiences. Another organization encouraged connectivity among employees by offering coffee gift cards to those who signed up to participate in one-on-one coffee chats with employees they didn’t know—a perk that improved connectivity and helped people expand their networks.
Employee engagement should focus now more than ever on employee experience. If you want to learn more about employee engagement, employee experience, how to implement a performance management system at the employee level, and how to align the company’s values, strategy, and objectives with employees behaviors, follow our Certified Employee Performance Management System Professional course.
Culture is an intriguing component of the organizational system, wouldn’t you say? Although most professionals agree on the importance of building a strong organizational culture, measuring the extent to which this goal has been achieved is quite challenging, and the tools for doing so have been few and far between. Fortunately, one such tool enables us to get the pulse of the organizational culture—the Global Performance Audit Unit’s performance culture audit.
Another way to get an idea of the state of an organization’s culture is to use metrics. For example, Sears uses what it calls Total Performance Indicators (TPIs) to monitor employee attitudes and retention. Similar to key performance indicators (KPIs), TPIs also relate to the more quantitative aspects of measurement. Using metrics to monitor performance or inform decision-making is always useful, but can we actually capture organizational culture in one metric or index?
Culture is a phenomenon that happens naturally in any group without necessarily being guided. Thus, it will always be a reflection of the people’s attitudes within that group. Culture appeals more to emotion than reason. Elusive and intangible, culture is something that can be easily felt but difficult to explain or justify.
Organizational culture embeds the beliefs and values that define a company, which serve to guide employees in their daily actions. Culture is a reflection of the company’s spirit, and to a large extent, I believe that an organization’s worth is equal to the value of its people.
Performance is a concept usually associated with processes that are more technical than cultural, such as financial performance or machinery performance. So why would anyone want to have a performance-oriented culture? For many people, this may seem like a very cold and profit-oriented working environment. In practice, there are several reasons to embed performance within your organizational culture:
Impact on Internal Stakeholders
Increases accountability regarding the quality of their work
Raises awareness on the importance of being efficient and results-oriented
Nurtures constant learning and professional improvement
Brings clarity on their roles and contributions to the organizational strategy
Increases engagement by rewarding performance
Impact on External Stakeholders
Positions the organization as a trustworthy and reliable partner
Influences the quality of products and services positively
Enhances customer experience
Improves employer brand and market image
A change management initiative to shift organizational culture to a performance-driven perspective can become quite an advantage for companies wishing to get ahead of their competition. To have more clarity around what a performance-oriented culture looks like, consider the following key attributes:
Shared Vision
Strong leadership is essential for any organization. Strong leaders can communicate their vision and inspire employees to follow them. This shared vision brings and keeps people together, empowering them to work as a team.
Communication
Intense and effective communication increases employees’ awareness and understanding of the company strategy. This impacts how they work and can help them make better decisions in full alignment with strategic directions.
Transparency regarding decisions and performance levels establishes greater levels of credibility and confidence in relation to leadership and generates employee interest towards understanding the impact of their actions on bottom-line results.
Continuous Learning
A performance-oriented culture acts as an enabler for implementing a performance management system (PMS) within the company. Monitoring performance facilitates the development of a constant learning process for the entire organization.
A performance-oriented culture not only sets targets but also provides employees with the necessary training or mentoring to achieve these targets.
Process Improvement
A common characteristic of performance-oriented organizations is their concern for constant optimization. By not being satisfied with “good” and always striving for “great”, the people in the organization adopt a state of mind in which they are constantly striving for efficiency.
Data Analytics
In the age of big data, we need to make sure that both the younger and older generations are accustomed to working and making use of data in their decisions. Modern organizations must have the competencies and habits of data analysis.
Technology
Progress in today’s business environment is limited without the support of modern technology. A performance-driven organization will invest in technology to support business processes.
Innovation
Technological growth will be conditioned by the organization’s ability to adapt to market dynamics and innovate to stay ahead of the competition. Innovation comes from employees, but what can make a difference between two companies that have the same talent pool is how each one manages to nurture innovation among its employees.
Rewards
A performance-oriented culture reflects a working environment where effort and success are acknowledged and rewarded. Rewards don’t have to be exclusively financial.
Engagement
A performance culture should nurture employee engagement through its employee-centered initiatives.
Authenticity
Organizations should be able to identify their uniqueness and acknowledge and promote it among stakeholders. This is what makes a company feel real and meaningful for its employees, customers, and business partners. For example, Zappos prides itself on its authenticity, which is reflected in one of its corporate values—weirdness.
The myriad of benefits that stem from a performance-oriented culture should be reason enough for any organization to adopt it. However, it’s worth noting that culture can be inherently divisive, especially when change is in the air. Leaders must take care when shifting from a culture that many of their employees have grown accustomed to in order to mitigate friction and foster buy-in.
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on March 12, 2016. It has been updated as of April 16, 2025.
Organizational culture is the unique environment of an organization that is formed through shared beliefs, values, experiences, specific rituals, behavior, interactions, language, and norms. These elements of the culture are developed over time in both visible and invisible ways, such as the organization’s output, interactions, goals, branding, company policies, reward systems, among others.
It is possible that most of the members of an organization are not aware of the origin of their rituals and why they are expected to behave in a specific way. Or they may know exactly what they are doing for what reason and can explain everything with facts. Which of these contradictory approaches characterize your organizational culture more?
Is it a cargo cult organization or “The Credible Hulk”?
Cargo cult thinking in organizations
Cargo cult refers to the belief that a real achievement can be realized by simply imitating visible behavior. This belief exists even without understanding the correlations between the different steps of a process and the consequences of actions.
The origin of this terminology goes back to the first half of the 20th century, when some remote-island-based tribes saw American cargo planes landing on their island. The tribes tried to recreate the different tools and instruments they saw from the cargo planes without knowing how those goods were manufactured. They made radio from stone and wood but without getting the same effect.
This phenomenon can be observed even in advanced 21st century cultures, particularly in the modern corporate world.
Many organizations are adopting the same practices they observe in other companies, such as workplace habits and the design of an office, without fully knowing their impact on the organization. For instance, some companies would place bean bags in the office even if they are hardly used. Some do not observe the business casual dress code on Fridays. And some have ping pong tables.
The paradox is that it is also a rational strategy to follow organizations or people who seem to know what they are doing. When used responsibly, cargo cult thinking can be really useful when making decisions because it saves management a lot of time.
Oversimplification versus overcomplication
Have you seen the meme “The Credible Hulk”? Inspired by the film and the character “The Incredible Hulk,” “The Credible Hulk” is a monster that backs up anything with facts and documents.
The opposite of cargo cult thinking is supporting new initiatives or practices with facts and research. Organizations with this kind of practice are deemed more credible in terms of their innovation practices.
These companies are the ones that look beyond the surface in order to analyze the successful elements of the other innovative organizations, such as Amazon, Apple, and Netflix. They do not just use transparent glass doors because they look good, but also because they want to promote transparency and improve communication in the organization.
However, such an approach is time and resource consuming. Organizations have to justify everything with research, leaving little to no room for instincts and creative innovations that could drive success in the long run.
Cargo cult thinking cannot be completely eliminated. The only way to exclude it from the organizational culture is to learn and know everything, and that is, apparently, impossible. Therefore, organizations could either find the right balance between the two opposite poles or customize their approach based on their goals, the company size, or the nature of their business.
At a time when talent and innovation are highly valued, a large majority of organizations fail to develop new and attractive products and services. So what can CEOs and managers do in order to drive innovation across their organization?
