Most HR leaders have said it or heard it: "We're focused on building a high-performance culture this year."

But ask what that means in practice, and the room gets quiet.

That gap — between the aspiration and the actual work — is exactly what Rebecca Taylor and Jamie Aitken, VP of HR Transformation at Betterworks, dug into in this session. No fluff, no buzzword bingo. Just a candid conversation about what it really takes to build a performance culture that holds up.

Here's everything they covered.

"High Performance Culture" Has Become Jargon — And That's a Problem

Rebecca kicked things off with a confession.

She'd been talking to HR leaders who told her their organizations were focused on high performance culture as a top priority. When she pushed on what that meant day to day, most of them didn't have a real answer.

Her conclusion: the phrase has become code for so many different strategies and management philosophies that it's stopped meaning anything. Jamie agreed. When a term means everything to everyone, it ends up meaning nothing to anyone.

The danger isn't just semantic. When you don't define what you mean, people fill in the gaps themselves. Jamie shared a story from her own career: an organization built around the idea of "entrepreneurial spirit." The intent was ownership and accountability. What actually happened was every leader ran their piece of the business their own way, with little collaboration and no shared definition of success.

People weren't being difficult. They were earnestly trying to live a value that had never been defined clearly enough to act on.

The first thing high-performance culture actually demands: a real definition. Not a tagline. A concrete, operational answer to — what does good look like here, and how do we know when we're achieving it?

High Performance Isn't a Vibe. It's Documentation.

Once you have a definition, you still have to operationalize it.

Rebecca was blunt about what that actually looks like: it's documentation, feedback loops, and consistent communication of expectations. The most boring part of change management is also the most important — the constant reinforcement of here's what we're trying to achieve, here's how we're doing, here's what needs to adjust.

It is not about correcting how someone said something in a meeting. It's about objectively looking at the data behind the work — what impact is this person making, are they hitting what they're supposed to hit, here's the evidence either way.

Jamie added that one of the most consistent drivers of employee engagement is whether people understand how their individual work connects to what the business is trying to achieve. It shows up in nearly every engagement survey as a top driver. Done right, high performance culture makes that connection visible at every level — and keeps reinforcing it as strategy shifts.

Both speakers landed on the same thing: the unsexy work is where performance culture actually gets built or lost. Giving tough feedback before it becomes a crisis. Having the conversation before the situation deteriorates to where a formal process is the only option left.

If your team needs a more consistent way to handle that, AllVoices' performance improvement workflows are worth a look — built specifically to help managers start earlier, when there's still time to turn things around.

Most Organizations Think They're Performing. Most Are Still Storming.

One of the sharpest moments in the whole conversation came from Rebecca referencing Tuckman's stages of development — forming, storming, performing, norming.

Her observation: most organizations believe they're performing. But the reality, especially right now, is that the majority are stuck in forming and storming — and calling it something else doesn't change the actual dynamics underneath.

With tenure dropping, people moving in and out of organizations constantly, and AI reshaping roles faster than org charts can keep up — most teams are living in near-permanent flux. Every reorg, every strategic pivot, every wave of new hires sends a team back to forming.

You can't declare yourself a high-performance culture and skip the stages. You have to actually move through them.

The organizations doing this well are the ones willing to be honest about where they actually are, and build their performance practices around that reality rather than the version they wish were true.

Why PIPs Have a Reputation Problem (And What to Do About It)

This is where the conversation got especially practical.

Rebecca was direct: PIPs have been weaponized. Too often they're used as a paper trail toward a predetermined outcome rather than a genuine attempt to help someone improve. When employees hear "performance improvement plan," many of them hear "you're about to be fired." That association didn't come from nowhere.

A commenter during the live session shared that their organization had dropped PIPs entirely, rebranding them as coaching plans. Both speakers responded positively.

The manager capacity problem

Jamie raised a concern that got a lot of attention: most managers right now are drowning.

They're carrying individual contributor workloads on top of management responsibilities, with shrinking support and growing expectations. If you want a true coaching culture, you can't just rename the process. You have to invest in managers' ability to actually coach — and track whether it's working.

Here's what Rebecca said a good performance improvement process should actually look like:

• Focus on outcomes, not behaviors
• Document the gap and set a clear metric for what improvement looks like
• Identify the coaching behaviors that should drive that outcome
• Check in on a cadence that allows for real course correction — not once a year

AllVoices' PIP tool is built around exactly this model — structured, outcome-focused workflows with step-by-step guidance for managers and real-time visibility for HR. And if you want a deeper dive on how to write one that actually works, this guide to establishing a PIP is worth bookmarking.

HR Can't Be an Order Taker Anymore

One of the most pointed exchanges of the session was about HR's role in performance conversations.

Too often, both speakers agreed, HR functions as an order taker. A manager comes in wanting to put someone on a PIP or let them go, and HR's job becomes making that happen in a legally defensible way.

That's not strategic HR. That's reactive HR.

Rebecca's challenge: the question shouldn't just be "how do we process this" — it should also be "at what point could we have intervened earlier?" Exit interviews and performance reviews are full of signals that pointed to problems months before they became crises. But HR only gets to connect those dots after the fact, because they weren't in the data early enough to see them forming.

Jamie framed HR's role as holding managers accountable in both directions. When a manager comes in wanting to act on someone's performance, the right question isn't just "how do we facilitate this." It's also — what coaching happened? What documentation exists from earlier conversations? If the answer is "not much," that's a problem for everyone involved.

This is the gap that centralized HR case management is built to close. When HR has real-time visibility into performance trends and manager patterns across the organization, they're not connecting dots after the fact. They're seeing the smoke before there's a fire.

Tying Performance to Business Outcomes — Without Killing Psychological Safety

A question from the live audience pushed the conversation into some of its most nuanced territory.

How do you tie performance assessment to business success without destroying people's tolerance for learning and failure? And how do you keep complacency from hiding behind experimentation?

Jamie's answer

HR hasn't historically been great at connecting performance programs to actual business outcomes. It runs processes and fills out forms — but the link between "we ran this performance cycle" and "here's what it produced for the business" is often missing.

Closing that gap starts at the program design level: being clear about what you're trying to achieve and how you'll know if it's working.

Rebecca's answer

A genuine high-performance culture requires some comfort with mistakes. Not as an excuse for underperformance — but as a recognition that learning is inherently messy. Teams that are afraid to fail are also afraid to try new things.

That's especially relevant right now, when every organization is navigating AI adoption and no one has a clean playbook. Rebecca brought it back to Tuckman: when you're in a forming or storming phase, failure is part of the process. Performance evaluation in a period of significant change has to account for the environment people are actually in.

The practical test both speakers endorsed: is someone actively trying things and learning from what doesn't work, or are they staying in their lane and avoiding the hard stuff?

Vera, AllVoices' AI copilot, is designed to help HR teams get ahead of exactly this. Rather than waiting for issues to surface through formal channels, Vera continuously scans case data for patterns and outliers — giving HR the early signal it needs to intervene before things escalate. It doesn't make decisions. It gives HR the visibility to make better ones.

The Change Fatigue Reality Check

Before the session wrapped, both speakers acknowledged something that often gets left out of performance conversations entirely: employees are genuinely exhausted.

Six years of compounding change — pandemic, return-to-office, economic uncertainty, and now AI reshaping entire job categories in real time — has left a lot of people in a state of change fatigue. They don't get time to adjust to one shift before the next one lands.

What that means for performance culture

Rebecca made the point that psychological safety isn't a nice-to-have right now. It's a prerequisite. Without it, "high performance culture" becomes a threat instead of an aspiration — and you get people who are too burned out and too afraid to do the experimental work that actually moves organizations forward.

Jamie added that this is especially visible in Europe, where psychological safety is increasingly front and center in conversations with HR leaders.

The takeaway: building a real performance culture right now means acknowledging the environment people are actually operating in — not the one you wish they were in.

What HR Leaders Should Take Away From This Session

The whole conversation kept circling back to the same core tension: HR is being asked to do more strategic work at the exact moment when most teams are least equipped to do it.

The fix isn't a rebrand or a new framework. It's infrastructure. It's data. It's having visibility into what's actually happening across your organization before it lands in your inbox as a crisis.

That's exactly what AllVoices is built to do — give HR teams the tools to move from reactive to proactive, with AI-powered insights, centralized case management, and performance workflows that actually help managers do their jobs.

Want to see how it works? Book a demo today.