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- WeAreHuman@Work | #027 | What If Performance Can’t Be Managed—Only Enabled?
WeAreHuman@Work | #027 | What If Performance Can’t Be Managed—Only Enabled?
WeAreHuman@Work is a newsletter dedicated to fostering a more sustainable world of work.
Tanguy Dulac
June 01, 2025
THIS WEEK'S CONTENT
Deloitte’s 2025 Global Human Capital Trends report is here—one of my favourite annual reads.
Over the next eight weeks, I’ll break down each trend into actionable insights for leaders navigating uncertainty and transformation.
This week: Trend #7: Reinventing Performance Management Processes Won’t Unlock Human Performance. Here’s What Will
Below is the executive summary and a few hand-picked resources to help you go deeper.
🔍 ZOOM IN
Reinventing Performance Management Processes Won’t Unlock Human Performance. Here’s What Will | Trend #7 from 2025 Global Human Capital Trends | Deloitte (2025)
Everyone agrees performance management is broken. But what if the fix isn’t fixing it—but forgetting it entirely?
This article reframes performance management as insufficient for today’s work complexity. The real unlock? Engineering performance in the flow of work—through redesigned systems, relationships, and environments. With powerful case examples and a new human-centric lens, Deloitte makes a compelling case for systemic reinvention. For leaders, it’s no longer about better processes—it’s about building the conditions where performance can thrive.
📊 DID YOU KNOW?
The numbers tell the story: only 2% of CHROs believe their performance management system works—and a mere 6% of organisations say they use data to improve performance while building trust.
👀 DID YOU SEE?
The figure below shows Deloitte’s human performance equation, positioning performance as the result of business and human outcomes, enabled by six system-wide levers. These include culture and design, manager and team connections, workforce practices, technology, workplace design, and performance management. The model shifts the focus from managing performance through isolated processes to engineering it through integrated, human-centred systems.
✨ EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
In their article, Julie Duda, Jason Flynn, Sue Cantrell, Nic Scoble-Williams, and Amy Sanford argue that performance management remains widely ineffective and mistrusted despite decades of reinvention. The article presents a bold reframe: performance processes are essential but insufficient. To unlock true human potential, organisations must adopt a broader, integrated approach—engineering human performance through systems, cultures, and environments that enable people to thrive.
This model calls for designing trust-based feedback systems, rethinking goal alignment, embedding well-being, and using technology to provide in-the-moment insights. Real-world cases—like Rolls-Royce resetting performance culture, McLaren linking well-being to race results, and Roche cutting learning cycles by 80%—offer proof of concept.
As the authors write: “We may need to move beyond process to a broader, more long-term effort to engineer human performance in the flow of everyday work.” It’s not about fixing performance reviews but about reimagining the human system surrounding them.
🔍 WHY IT MATTERS
↳ Performance management fatigue is rising. After years of tweaks and redesigns, most systems are still ineffective. Leaders risk eroding credibility as yet another reinvention fails to deliver meaningful results.
↳ Trust and clarity are foundational to performance. Only 47% of workers know what’s expected of them, and fewer than 1 in 3 believe performance reviews are fair. These gaps fracture engagement, hinder development, and amplify attrition risk.
↳ Business impact is at stake. Organisations effective at enabling human performance are 2.08 times more likely to report strong financial outcomes—making this a strategic imperative, not a nice-to-have.
↳ The human system drives the performance system. Performance efforts become mechanical and disengaging without redesigning the broader context—culture, leadership, technology, and workspace.
↳ Reinvention without redesign leads to drift. Tinkering with forms and cycles misses the deeper issue: people don’t trust or benefit from the process. Without systems that support daily performance, disengagement becomes the default.
💡 KEY INSIGHTS
↳ A single process can’t unlock performance. Performance management serves important purposes—rewards and promotion—but can’t drive outcomes independently. The context in which people work is what enables real performance.
↳ Trust is both missing and essential. Only 26% of organisations believe their managers effectively enable team performance. Cocreation, fairness, and transparency must be built into every stage of assessment and feedback.
↳ Design impacts performance—from culture to coffee machines. A pharmaceutical company increased sales by 20% after redesigning its office to spark interaction. Rolls-Royce and McLaren both redesigned their environments and expectations to improve outcomes.
↳ Real-time data and AI offer new leverage. From thoughtful factory feedback to live coaching for sales teams, tech is shifting from monitoring workers to enabling performance—delivering support at the moment, not after the fact.
↳ Worker well-being is performance infrastructure. AXA’s “We Care” programme linked mental health, family care, and physical wellness to worker and business outcomes—showing that holistic well-being drives real-world impact.
🚀 ACTIONS FOR LEADERS
↳ Design a human performance strategy—not just a process. Start with a clear North Star defining human performance in your context. Make it a leadership priority, not just an HR initiative.
↳ Decouple assessment from development. Follow Deloitte’s recommendation to separate coaching and evaluation. Embed developmental feedback into the flow of work, not annual reviews.
↳ Reward performance without punishing underperformance. Like WalkMe and Rolls-Royce, rethink your bonus structures to motivate top performers without demoralising others—building fairness into compensation design.
↳ Equip managers as enablers—not just evaluators. Train leaders to give timely, unbiased, actionable feedback. Standard Chartered’s manager coaching community is a strong example of this investment in capability.
↳ Use technology for in-the-moment performance feedback. Tools like Salesforce Einstein or wearable data dashboards can deliver real-time insights that help workers grow—without waiting for year-end cycles.
💬 QUESTION FOR THE BOARDROOM
How would our performance outcomes change if we stopped managing performance—and started engineering it?
🔗 CONCLUSION
This article delivers a timely warning to leaders still pouring energy into performance management reforms that don’t deliver. Julie Duda and co-authors urge us to look beyond process and toward the broader system: workplace culture, trust, design, and real-time enablement.
Organisations that excel at human performance don’t just review or rate people—they create environments where performance is nurtured, understood, and amplified. By shifting the focus to enabling performance every day, in every interaction, leaders can unlock the true potential of their workforce.
What’s at stake isn’t just productivity—it’s relevance. In an age where roles are fluid and expectations personal, the ability to engineer performance will distinguish thriving organisations from those stuck in outdated cycles. This is a mindset shift, not a metrics tweak.
🎯 KEY TAKEAWAY
Real performance isn't managed—it's engineered through trust, clarity, and connection in the flow of work.
📚 READ
Measure What Matters by John Doerr Far more than a productivity tool, Measure What Matters is a call to radical clarity in fast-moving organisations. Doerr unpacks the OKR method—pioneered at Intel and scaled at Google—to show how setting bold objectives and tracking measurable results can transform ambition into execution. With sharp insight and real-world cases, he reveals how the discipline of focus, alignment, and accountability helps leaders build teams that perform with purpose. |  |
🎧 TUNE IN
If this trend had an anthem, it would be “Anti-Hero” by Taylor Swift.
“It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.”
This is how performance management still makes many people feel.
Not challenged. Not supported.
Just… inadequate.
Despite all the redesigns, the mindset hasn’t shifted.
We’re still teaching people to internalise failure — instead of fixing the systems that misunderstand them.
This trend calls for something deeper than process updates.
It calls for a redefinition of performance itself:
Less judgement. More meaning.
Less standardisation. More humanity.
Taylor Swift gave us the lyric.
Now leaders need to stop reinforcing the problem — and start rehumanising the system.
You cannot mandate productivity, you must provide the tools to let people become their best.