How to Improve Employee Performance

The pace of work is faster, more complex, and more uncertain than ever before. Employees are navigating new norms — hybrid work, AI integration, and economic pressures — that challenge their ability to perform. At the same time, companies need high-performing, agile teams to achieve ambitious goals and outpace the competition.

Implementing processes that improve employee performance, though, is possible, and the best solutions are often simple ones. Better communication, clear expectations, and feedback can go a long way toward improving work performance.

However, improving employee performance requires intentionality and commitment to supporting employees in their day-to-day performance. Here’s how to develop performance improvement strategies and implement measurements, processes, and cultural norms to improve employee performance at your company.

How do you define high performance?

Before diving into employee performance improvement suggestions, let’s cover the basics: Organizations must define what high performance means in today’s workplace. You can start by aligning roles to outcomes and ensuring fair, data-driven metrics for measuring progress. Here’s how to define high performance for each role at your company.

Benchmark employees and identify key skills 

High performers consistently drive exceptional results, but what behaviors, skills, and mindsets fuel their success? Before you can set learning goals for each employee, you need to identify the human characteristics that drive success in the role.

Use benchmarking to identify top talent, analyze their approach, and distill the skills required for success in each role. For example, let’s say your best sales reps excel at active listening and problem-solving. High emotional intelligence and active listening may help them pinpoint customer problems, for instance, so they can sell solutions that solve those problems. These become priority skills for the team to develop. 

You can use analytics tools like Betterworks Advanced Analytics to pinpoint patterns and uncover skill gaps across your workforce to guide smarter investments in learning and development.

Align individual work to strategic impact

Every role must be tied to outcomes that matter for the business. To define high performance, you have to first determine the potential impact of a role. Start by reviewing job descriptions and the skills needed to prioritize the essential outputs for each role. 

Organizations should:

• Prioritize outputs that provide the greatest strategic value.
• Align employee goals to company objectives using a goals framework like OKRs or SMART goals.

This clarity helps employees connect their daily work to a bigger purpose. Betterworks Goals, for example, ensures alignment, allowing teams to set agile goals that adjust to changing priorities.

Develop metrics for governing performance

Managers can struggle with performance metrics, especially if they are new to their role. A lack of clear goals and the complexity of roles, particularly with cross-functional teams, can make gauging performance difficult. Without quantitative, trackable metrics, managers may fall back on perceptions and preferences rather than specific performance outcomes. 

Managers may also be tempted to micromanage employees to “know” that they’re working. On the other side of the spectrum are managers who will water down the performance assessment to avoid being perceived as critical and to protect the manager-employee relationship. Having a set of clear metrics to gauge performance will make the job of managing performance easier and lead to accurate, actionable, and effective performance evaluations.

Once you’ve set a performance baseline and identified each role’s strategic impact, you need to drill down to the specific outcomes each employee in the role must consistently produce to be considered high-performing. If a project manager’s priority is to use resources effectively to deliver projects on time and within budget, those are the metrics their supervisor will review to assess performance.

With clear metrics based on outcomes in place, managers can easily see whether employees are meeting their performance goals. 

9 steps to improve employee performance

The greatest opportunities for improving performance often come from daily management practices. People generally want to improve, but they need managers to be present “in the moment” with the support and resources they need to do so. 

Here are nine best practices for improving performance.

Connect company values with performance

Company values inspire performance, but only if employees know how to apply them. If your values are too vague or abstract, employees won’t recognize how they intersect with their roles or how to apply them in their daily performance.

To bring company value home, managers must link values to specific behaviors and decisions for each role. Train managers to live the values first—if integrity is a core value, they should model it in daily interactions. When managers lead by example, they empower teams to integrate values into their work, driving stronger performance.

Clarify performance objectives

Clear, actionable objectives are essential for performance. Vague goals or misaligned priorities leave employees unsure of where to focus. If desired outcomes aren’t defined on the front end, employees won’t know how to prioritize their workloads to focus on the activities that create the most value.

Managers should help employees distill tasks into priorities and set clear expectations. Tools like goal-setting software, combined with AI assistants, simplify this process, enabling employees to develop stronger, aligned goals in a fraction of the time.

Build a culture of continuous performance conversations

Strong communication is key to improving work performance. Misunderstandings can create misalignment, leading employees to focus their energy in the wrong places. Employees crave frequent, meaningful performance feedback to adjust their efforts and grow. When managers and employees communicate frequently in one-on-ones, they establish a foundation of trust that empowers them to communicate honestly and collaborate as equals working toward the same goals.

Tools like Betterworks Conversations provide managers with templates for impactful 1:1s and check-ins, covering performance feedback, goals, and career development. AI-assisted insights further enhance communication by pulling data on goals, feedback, and recognition to help managers coach effectively, set clear expectations, and provide actionable takeaways. Regular conversations—whether weekly 1:1s or structured quarterly check-ins—empower employees to celebrate wins, tackle challenges, and take ownership of their growth.

Listen first, solve faster

Active listening is key to removing roadblocks and boosting performance. When managers hear employees’ concerns early —for example, around workload, workflow, and priorities — they can solve problems before they escalate. Train managers to listen with humility—prioritizing employee input before offering solutions.

The more effective communication is on the front end, the easier it will be to remove roadblocks in the flow of work. If an employee raises a concern before beginning a task, for instance, a manager who practices good active listening will consider a solution before the situation becomes a problem.

Eliminate bias 

Without clear criteria, managers will be left guessing whether employees have performed adequately. Biases, such as recency bias and proximity bias, then have more space to creep in and tarnish a review. For example, in a hybrid work environment, a manager might evaluate an employee they see in person as a higher performer than an employee who is fully remote, even if their outputs are equal.

Stop micromanaging—trust outcomes, not oversight

Micromanaging signals distrust and often stems from poor management training. Hovering over employees to measure productivity leads to disengagement and half-hearted effort.

Instead, train managers to focus on outcomes. With clear performance metrics in place, managers can step back, trust their teams, and measure success based on results—not control.

Train and develop

In today’s fast-paced world—especially with the rise of generative AI—employee skills can quickly become outdated. To keep up, reskilling and upskilling must be constant. Managers and employees should collaborate to identify skill gaps early, whether for immediate tasks or long-term growth.

Equip managers with the tools to guide employees toward learning resources that transform weaknesses into strengths. Set clear milestones to track progress and keep development on course, ensuring employees stay agile and ready for what’s next.

Ditch performance improvement plans (PIPs)

Performance improvement plans (PIPs) rarely achieve their intended purpose. Instead of providing a lifeline, they often feel like a warning label that demoralizes employees. “In reality, the success rate of surviving a PIP is very low and stressful for all involved,” says Doug Dennerline, CEO of Betterworks.

PIPs fail because they’re reactive, not proactive, and overlook shared accountability. Poor performance often stems from unclear expectations, lack of resources, or insufficient training—issues managers and organizations must own. 

A better approach? Shift focus to coaching. Frequent one-on-one conversations allow managers to address performance gaps, nurture strengths, and co-create actionable goals. This collaborative approach to employee performance appraisals is supportive, and fosters trust, ownership, and continuous development.

Make feedback a two-way street

Constructive, ongoing feedback is key to improving performance—but it must flow both ways. Managers should offer actionable input in real time while welcoming employee feedback on workflows, processes, and blockers.

Effective communication starts with listening. When managers engage attentively and respectfully, employees feel heard and empowered to share insights. This builds trust, improves collaboration, and ensures feedback drives meaningful performance improvements.

Top 3 ways to improve work performance culturally

The prevailing attitudes and cultural norms present in a company have a huge impact on whether employees feel that they can reach their performance potential. Here are the top three ways to improve performance by reshaping the workplace culture.

Prioritize transparency

Cultural transparency is an essential component of improved employee performance. It empowers everyone to become a strategic thinker. Employees should be able to get a sense of everyone’s performance at the company and how their own contributions fit in.

A goals framework creates transparency around business priorities so that employees can clearly see how their goals connect to the bigger picture. When employees can see the company’s end goals, they can gain a better sense of their own strategic value as part of the whole. With this perspective, employees become more self-aware and can work with their managers to improve their own performance.

Goal alignment software can help create more visibility into the role each employee plays in driving the business strategy. 

Demonstrate authenticity

In addition to being transparent, the company culture must support and reward authenticity. People quickly pick up on inauthenticity in leadership. Executives and other leaders need to demonstrate the company’s values in their daily actions. Doing so improves the workforce’s respect and loyalty, which helps with engagement and, consequently, performance.

Additionally, leaders must provide genuine recognition to employees for their high performance. Verbal recognition from leaders in a public forum, for example, can enhance an employee’s pride in their work.

Authenticity supports better check-ins between employees and their managers, too. When employees feel safe accepting genuine constructive feedback or offering it themselves, then managers and employees can collaborate to reach better solutions — faster.

Encourage ambitious stretch goals

Moon shots, or stretch goals, are extremely ambitious goals that may even seem impossible. Moon shots move employees out of their comfort zones. By encouraging employees to set stretch goals, employers signal that they believe their employees can take big chances and create big changes.

An essential part of this approach to fostering a culture of learning. Employees at all levels should always set ambitious learning goals for themselves, and continuous self-improvement should be baked into performance conversations. 

Moon shots can be risky, but they drive big rewards. By empowering employees to work with their managers to set ambitious objectives, the company demonstrates that it values employee contributions beyond the daily grind. 

A strong workplace culture accelerates employee performance improvement. Companies should prioritize transparency, reward authenticity, and encourage continuous learning. Employees who feel valued and supported are naturally more engaged, productive, and resilient.

Give managers training and tools to boost employee performance

Modern performance management is about enabling employees, not just measuring them. Empower managers to build trust, provide continuous coaching, and eliminate roadblocks so employees can thrive.

The true differentiator between adequate and outstanding performance starts with the manager-employee relationship. Trust should be built into managers’ daily interactions with employees. When managers can be open, transparent, and trustworthy, they will prompt employee loyalty. When they can listen effectively, gather employee feedback, and solve problems that could hold employees back, they promote higher performance and strengthen conditions that result in higher discretionary effort and retention..

When managers focus on outcomes, listen actively, and support growth, employees feel empowered to perform at their best—no micromanaging required. Give your teams the tools and trust they need, and improved employee performance will follow.

Reshaping company culture for performance gains

By incorporating these strategies to improve employee performance, organizations can transform their workforce into a high-performing, agile team. With tools like Betterworks, HR leaders can streamline processes, deliver impactful feedback, and ensure alignment across all levels of the organization. Whether you’re looking for employee performance improvement suggestions or seeking comprehensive solutions to improve employee performance, the path starts with intentionality and a commitment to growth.

Go deeper into learning about the best performance management approaches.