Employees in high-performing companies are almost four times more likely to say they have great leaders

People make or break a company, something that’s easy to forget with all the hullaballoo over AI. Paycor, a human capital management platform, surveyed over 7,000 American employees, half of whom worked in HR, over what makes companies and employees successful. Here are the key insights:

• Attracting and retaining talent is the biggest challenge: 71% of companies say finding quality employees is their biggest recruiting challenge. Meanwhile, 38% of employees who have been at a company for less than two years are more likely to search for a new job within the following year. Concerningly, half (46%) of HR professionals have been in their jobs for two years or less.
• Leader feedback is essential for high performance: employees in high-performing companies are 110% more likely to get productive feedback from managers and 397% more likely to say their leaders are engaged and inspirational. However, only 39% of remote workers say they get productive feedback from their managers, compared to 56% of hybrid employees and 50% of onsite employees. Meanwhile, hybrid and onsite workers say burnout is the number one reason managers are ineffective—but remote employees beg to differ. They say their managers don’t have enough HR support.
• Strong leaders drive strong financial performance: Also, 83% of companies with excellent financial performance in the last year agreed that their leaders were highly effective. By comparison, 85% of companies with poor economic performance said their leaders were ineffective.

“It could be that in high-performing companies, HR has figured out ways to give managers back time in their days to coach and develop [teams],” the report’s authors wrote.