What 236,000 employees reveal about high-performing organizations

Being above average sounds like good news. But if you're benchmarking your people data against the middle of the pack, you're measuring the wrong thing.

The organizations that truly stand out — the ones where people grow, trust their leadership, and actually want to stay — aren't just slightly better than average. They're doing something structurally different.

In our latest report, Winning with Data: High-Performing Organizations, we’ve analyzed 876 organizations and more than 236,000 employees across 16 industries to find out exactly what separates the top 25% from everyone else. Here's what the data shows.

What does "high-performing" actually mean?

A High-Performing Organization is defined as an organization that scores in the top 25% of the High Performance Index (HPI) — a composite measure built from six engagement categories that together describe the cultural and structural conditions found in the best workplaces.

Those six categories are:

1. Leadership: How well managers give feedback, set expectations, and create clarity

2. Trust: Confidence in both direct managers and senior leadership

3. Psychological Safety: The freedom to speak up, take risks, and challenge decisions

4. Team Spirit: Collaboration, creative problem-solving, and information flow

5. Participation: Having genuine voice and influence over decisions

6. Personal Development: Access to learning, growth, and career progression

The science behind these categories is what makes them more than a checklist. As Rahat Rishi, Senior People Scientist at Winningtemp, explains in the webinar Hybrid Listening: How modern organizations can turn insights into action:

"A category is simply one distinct aspect of the employee experience that you can measure — how someone feels about their relationship with their manager, how safe they feel speaking up, how sustainable their workload is. Each one is grounded in organizational psychology research, each measuring something meaningfully different. The question of which ones to measure, how often, and what to do when they move — that's a listening strategy. Not just a survey."

What makes High Performers distinctive is not excellence in one of these areas. It's consistent strength across all six simultaneously. The gap between the top quartile and the rest falls in a tight band of 12 to 14% across every category. There is no single lever — and there is no shortcut.

What high performers do differently?

In the report, you can find seven key findings that together explain what high-performing cultures consistently do, and where most organizations leave performance on the table. Here are a few examples.

1. They invest broadly

The cultures that reach the top quartile raise everything together. The biggest risk isn't missing a strength. It's having one weak link. A single underperforming category is often enough to hold an organization out of the top 25%.

2. Personal development is the clearest opportunity

Growth is one of the first things organizations promise. It's also the first thing they fail to deliver. In 85.5% of organizations from the report, Personal Development is the weakest category of all six, and it shows the largest gap between High Performers and the rest. That's not a coincidence. It's a pattern.

What makes it particularly telling is how employees' perception of growth changes over time. The statement "this company is a good place to learn" starts high during onboarding and drops nearly 30% by the four-year mark. People don't lower their expectations because they've grown cynical. They lower them because the reality didn't match the promise.

3. Team spirit and employee voice are the strongest independent predictors

Investing in learning programs and leadership development matters, but it's not enough on its own. When researchers look at what most distinctly separates High Performers from the rest, two categories stand out above the others: Team Spirit and Participation.

In other words, you can have the best training catalogue in your industry, but if people don't feel like they're genuinely collaborating or that their voice actually shapes decisions, you won't reach the top quartile. High-performing cultures are places where people build on each other's ideas, and where "having a say" isn't just a value on the wall.

4. Institutional trust matters more than manager trust

Most employees trust their direct manager. That's consistent across the data and, frankly, across most organizations. But it's not what sets High Performers apart.

What does is a deeper, harder-to-build kind of trust: belief in the institution itself. Whether senior leadership is competent, act fairly, and whether their intentions can be trusted. The single most differentiating question across all 40 measured in the study is simply: "I am proud to work for this company."

That shifts the conversation away from team-level engagement and toward something the C-suite owns directly — through how they make decisions on pay, promotions, and the values they visibly live by. It's uncomfortable, because it can't be delegated to HR. But the data is clear: when institutional trust erodes, the effects run deep.

5. New hires are your most engaged employees  

The day someone joins is the peak of their engagement. Employees in their first three months score up to 24% higher than colleagues who have been around for four or more years, and from there, scores gradually slide.

What drops fastest are Job Satisfaction, Personal Development, and Trust — the exact categories most tied to what was promised during hiring. The report calls this the Broken Promise Effect: a systematic erosion that begins the moment someone walks through the door and widens with every year the reality falls short of the expectation.  

High Performers aren't immune to this. But their drop is smaller. Not because they overpromise less — because they follow through on more.

6. Psychological safety is durable, but unevenly distributed

Of all six categories, Psychological Safety holds up best over time — dropping only 6% from onboarding to long tenure. That makes early investment here unusually valuable. But most organizations build the surface version of it, where asking for help is normalized. What High Performers have is the harder kind: where people feel safe challenging a decision, raising something uncomfortable, or taking a real professional risk.

It's also worth noting that men report significantly higher Psychological Safety than women — a gap that's easy to miss in organization-wide averages. Want to go deeper? Read our guide: How to improve psychological safety in your workplace.

Want the full picture?

These findings show where the gap sits. The full report shows you how to close it — with a generational breakdown, industry-by-industry analysis, and five concrete actions HR leaders can take to start moving the needle.

→ Download report