Have you found yourself in the situation where you feel the need to provide incentives for your people to do what they’re being paid to do? See if this scenario resonates with you:

I recently met with a CEO client who commented that while she has noticed an improvement in engagement and culture across her company over the last twelve months, unfortunately only about a third of her people were consistently hitting their KPI’s. And so, in conjunction with her Head of People & Culture, she was considering introducing a monthly incentive scheme to reward people when they hit their targets as a way of shifting performance.

You could see a lightbulb switch on when I questioned her to confirm that her intention was to reward people for doing what she paid them to do.

This is typical of many clients I’ve spoken to who find themselves facing the challenge of how best to manage the dynamic between performance and wellbeing dynamic in 2023. This critical dynamic has shifted somewhat over the last few years and looks like it will continue to move in the year ahead. You need to stay attuned to this dynamic in order to provide the right contextual frame for your people that enables them to flourish and deliver on their accountabilities.

Most of us would acknowledge how the profile of wellbeing has significantly lifted. The focus on mental health, resilience, wellbeing and work-life balance has provided many benefits as well as being a great support as we navigated our Covid lived experience. Besides, it was so hard to find people, the best recruitment strategy was to look after your people really well so that they stayed!

And beyond Covid, many of us have we’ve got used to and accepted as our new ‘standard’ a hybrid working rhythm that provides the chance to stay in our trackies, avoid travel time and get some washing done for one or two days a week while we work from home.

Looking ahead into 2023 we can see change and economic uncertainty and a need to face into the commercial reality that every organisation must attend to in order to remain sustainable. We’ve seen the impact of this already, particularly in the tech sector, with thousands of layoffs and staff reduction announcements.

So, here’s your opportunity – to provide the right contextual frame that continues a focus on wellbeing, values and engagement AND provides very clear expectations on performance and deliverables. You can think of this as represented in the dialogue between the CEO and the Head of People & Culture in the example above. These two contexts (people and performance) need to fit together in a way that reflects the commercial reality of the times we find ourselves in.

If engagement levels are strong but performance is sub-par, don’t resort to incentives to lift performance. Instead, turn the dial on the performance – wellbeing dynamic and recalibrate the expectations that you may have let slide over the last few years.

Not only can you have both, you need both in order for your organisation to be sustainable as we head deeper into 2023.

Need help with your performance-wellbeing dynamic, get in touch.