Your star employee consistently hits targets, but they’re also the source of a lot of tension. It’s a classic dilemma: do you keep the high performer who boosts profits or protect your company culture by letting them go?
The Problem: Performance vs Culture Clash
A high performer who doesn’t align with your culture can have a ripple effect on the team, leading to lower morale, increased turnover, and a toxic work environment.
The HR Solution: Balancing Performance with Culture
Here’s how to navigate this tricky decision:
Define Your Non-Negotiables: What’s more important – short-term gains or long-term culture? If your business thrives on collaboration and respect, keeping a toxic high performer can do more harm than good (Harvard Business Review, 2022).
Now I know you’re probably sitting there now thinking, easy for you to say, we still need the money to come through the door (that the high performer brings in) to pay the bills, so how do we balance potentially exiting them, with cash flow challenges?
Picture this, you are the business owner and have a team of seven. Across a period of 5 months, six of those employees leave your business. You are left with the ‘high performer’. You hire new team members to fill the void, but you also have a full book of client work that a team of seven were going to deliver on. You have now had to step back into the client delivery work. Your brand is suffering reputational loss because you and the high performer are struggling to keep up with the timeframes you had promised clients. Not only are you having to do the client delivery, but you’re also having to onboard these new team members, because deep down, you know the ‘high performer’ won’t give them the onboarding experience to set them up well. Six exits across a period of five months – the latest data tells us on average it costs Australian businesses $20,0001 to hire a new employee and on average, 35 days to become productive1. You have indirectly spent $100,000 on new hires and 5x 1 month of salaries (on average $46,000) for the new team members to be productive.
This might sound dramatic, and you think it won’t happen to you (and I hope it doesn’t!) but is a real-life story of a business owner who came to us looking for help. It broke our hearts that he didn’t come to us 12 months earlier, when we could have saved him some of this heartbreak.
We worked with this business owner and his new team and have all now worked together as one for 4 years. He prioritised culture after letting the high performer go. He saw his new team work with positive morale and no longer felt like a prisoner in his own business.