2025’s business landscape is brutal. Organizations face relentless competition, disruptions that pop up seemingly overnight, geopolitical and socioeconomic challenges that require daily analytical thinking and action, escalating customer expectations, and issues with talent acquisition and retention. How can businesses survive, let alone thrive, in these conditions?
The ones that thrive enjoy almost evangelical customer and employee loyalty, rapid growth, high revenue, and have top talent knocking on their door to come and join them. They’re known as high performing companies, and they seem to be getting everything right. How are they doing it?
We wanted to identify the characteristics that separate these elite, high performing companies from ‘the rest’, so we did some research. We took data from 47 high performing companies and approximately 900,000 employee respondents.
These high performing companies:
- outstrip their competition on employee engagement by an average of 13%
- earn 71% greater total revenue growth
- make 150% greater gross profit YoY growth
While employee engagement is still an important predictor of organizational success, the modern workplace is more complex. Measuring engagement on its own is no longer sufficient for providing a holistic view of employee experience.
While we don’t have all the answers, our findings revealed a universal truth: regardless of industry, country, or size, the core drivers of exceptional performance are the same.
The 10 drivers of high performance companies
1. Motivation
Employee motivation is the amount of energy, dedication, and creativity that employees bring to work every day.
We all know that active, committed, and innovative employees can make a greater contribution to a company than exhausted, unimaginative, and unmotivated ones. When employees are motivated, they’re more likely to bring their best selves to work and achieve great things.
75% of employees at high-performing companies feel that they are motivated to contribute more than is required to do their jobs.
2. Inclusion
Through company norms and behaviors, a culture of workplace inclusion ensures that everyone is given equal opportunity - and made to feel welcome - to participate and contribute. And to have true inclusion, you need diversity: a mix of gender, generations, and cultural backgrounds, and careful consideration of what it takes to support employees with different backgrounds and experiences to excel.
82% of employees at high-performing companies feel that everyone can succeed to their full potential, compared with 72% at non high-performing companies.
3. Well-Being
Employee well-being covers all aspects of working life: health and safety, the physical working environment, workplace culture, work-life balance, psychological safety and trust, and employees’ job satisfaction. A workplace that fosters employee well-being - both the physical and mental health of employees - delivers positive outcomes for individuals and the organization. Employees who report positive well-being are emotionally positive and consider themselves more engaged, productive, and more able to face challenges.
In high-performing companies, 88% of employees feel they have trusting relationships at work.
4. Trust in leadership
Forget the cult of the charismatic CEO, shut in their C-suite ivory tower, unaware of what’s going down on the shop floor. True trust in leadership is the belief that a company's leaders are capable, committed and on the same side as employees. When employees trust their leaders, managers, and peers, they get a strong sense of belonging - and that delivers great things for the business.
Successful companies are run on trust. Creating an environment of trust is an important responsibility for a business leader. When a team trusts its leader, and the leader trusts the team, together they accomplish great things with less difficulty and better outcomes.
We found that high-performance companies have 83% trust in senior leadership, against 64% for less high performance companies.
5. Managing change
Organizational change that rocks the status quo brings uncertainty, stress, instability and risk to all employees. But when you can give meaning and purpose to the change, employees are more likely to engage with it successfully.
Ironically, many high performing companies rarely need a specific strategy for managing employee engagement during change because they have already created a culture and climate where organizational change is a normal and accepted part of working life.
But if they do, there’s more engagement with change if it is properly communicated and everyone feels ‘all in it together’. Leaders in high performing companies take ownership of the process themselves, and don’t leave it solely to the HR department or external change management consultants.
78% of the high performance companies’ employees felt that the company was making changes necessary to compete effectively, with 75% agreeing that the company does a good job of communicating the reasons behind important changes.
6. Living the values
A company’s core values matter. They define a business’s purpose and are the essence of its brand identity. They are the central, guiding beliefs and principles that underpin a company and its employees: ‘cultural cornerstones’ that also frame the company’s relationships with employees, customers, partnerships, and stakeholders.
As such, it’s essential that leaders’ behaviors and decision-making are informed by defined company values, and they are role models for them. Clearly employees in high performing companies recognize this, as 81% agreed that the behavior of their senior leadership was consistent with the company's values.
7. Open communication
Effective communication determines how a business performs - or does not. Good workplace communication:
- explains and manages change
- details the future direction for the company
- enables teams to work together on common goals
- helps employees understand how and why things are done the way they are
- provides a springboard for innovation and opportunities
- prevents mistakes from being repeated in the future
Only 59% of employees at lower performing companies, compared with 72% at high performance companies feel that senior leadership communicates a motivating vision of the future to them.
8. Recognition
Employee recognition, or appreciation, is all about acknowledging the hard work and accomplishments of the individuals and teams within your organization. What was once a ‘nice to have’ benefit, employee recognition is now essential. Today, employee recognition programs help boost engagement, motivate employees, and keep hybrid teams connected and productive, as well as reinforcing to employees they are valued.
81% of employees at a high performing organization agreed with the statement, ‘this company values my contribution’ against 66% non high performance.
9. Authority and empowerment
Empowered employees know they have the ability to accomplish tasks successfully, believe that their team, management, and organization are behind them, and have confidence in them. Empowering employees is consistently linked with positive outcomes and our research backs this up, as 83% of high performing companies’ employees say they are ‘empowered to make decisions to best serve my customers’.
And authority - being free to accomplish things as employees - goes hand-in-hand with empowerment. Without empowerment, authority may simply feel like being alone in an unsupported or unstructured job role. When employees are given authority and are empowered to use it, they have permission to try things out, and to fail without fear of repercussions.
10. High performance and accountability
High performance isn't something celebrated only in the boardroom; it should be experienced every day by employees, from the front lines to the C-suite. What high performing companies do particularly effectively is emphasizing the importance of doing those routine, daily tasks well and connecting them to the bigger picture of overall company success. By listening to everyone, empowering them to do their best work and making them accountable for their role, a company improves the performance of every employee.
Feedback is the key here: 83% of employees in high performance companies agree that they ‘receive feedback that helps me improve my performance’.
And finally…
One more thing that high performing companies do is collect and analyze operational, employee and customer data using platforms such as Qualtrics® XM for Employee Experience™ to track real-time key performance indicators (KPIs) and use that data to make strategic decisions. They’re not afraid to embrace AI and other software tools to aggregate information across the entire organization for a holistic view and understanding of how all departments affect each other.