Defining Thriving Teams
At Quantum Workplace, we’ve spent more than 20 years studying what connects people to their work, teams, and organizations. We've learned that connection is powerful. When employees feel seen, supported, and part of something bigger, they stay longer and care more.
But we've also discovered that connection alone isn’t enough. Some teams felt close and committed—but struggled to deliver results. We began to see how deeply performance and connection depend on each other.
Performance and connection are inseparable. When performance is weak, even the most connected teams lose energy and purpose. When connection is weak, high-performing teams burn out and break down.
When both are strong, teams enter a virtuous cycle—one where results and retention sustain each other. That’s what it means to thrive. Thriving isn’t about comfort or happiness. It’s about energy, ownership, and outcomes that last.
Four conditions of thriving teams:
Thriving teams consistently share four core conditions that strengthen both connection and performance:
Thriving teams are aligned. They know where they’re headed and why it matters. Thriving teams are empowered. They have the clarity, confidence, and authority to act. Thriving teams are growing. They’re developing the skills and capacity to succeed long term. Thriving teams feel valued. They feel seen, rewarded, and trusted for their contributions.
Together, these form the foundation for sustainable success.
What's Inside
Inside, you’ll find practical tools and prompts to think differently about how you can best help managers build alignment, trust, and momentum across their teams.
Q1: Aligned: Create clarity and context around what matters—at every level.
Q2: Empowered: Give teams the voice, trust, and tools to move forward.
Q3: Growing: Increase capabilities and build leaders across your organization.
Q4: Valued: Ensure employees feel appreciated and valued for their work.
Building clarity and confidence in every role
Alignment starts with understanding. Before you can connect goals or accelerate performance, employees need to know what’s expected of them—and why it matters.
When expectations are clear, people move faster and make better decisions. When they’re not, energy gets lost in rework and frustration.
HR’s role is to ensure every employee can see the line between their role, their team’s priorities, and the organization’s strategy.
Practical Guidance
Start with purpose. Help leaders translate company goals and strategies into plain language. What does it really mean to be the easiest company to work with? To accelerate product development? The clearer leaders are about the “big picture,” the easier it becomes for teams to define how their work contributes.
Define success signals. Move beyond vague expectations. Describe what good looks like through specific outcomes tied to business priorities and strategic goals.
Enable two-way clarity. Equip managers to co-create expectations—discussing priorities, boundaries, and measures of success together with employees. Shared understanding turns accountability into commitment.
Reinforce regularly. Help managers build “clarity checks” into one-on-ones or team meetings to ensure expectations evolve alongside the business and its strategy.
Turning clarity into momentum with clear, aligned goals
Once roles are clear, alignment depends on shared goals that are:
- defined collaboratively
- reviewed regularly
- connected to purpose
Too often, goals feel like paperwork—just deadlines, forms, checkboxes. Thriving teams treat goals as living roadmaps—tools that connect the company’s big picture to each team’s daily work.
HR’s role is to make alignment scalable by building consistent goal frameworks and conversation rhythms that keep clarity alive—and by encouraging shared goals across departments that must work together to achieve company-wide success.
Practical Guidance
Establish a shared framework. Use a consistent approach (OKRs, SMART goals, etc.) focused on meaningful outcomes to connect goals from the organizational level down through teams and individuals.
Encourage co-creation. Invite managers and employees into the goal-setting process. When they help define success, they feel ownership and drive stronger accountability.
Promote shared goals. Encourage teams that depend on one another—like product and sales, or HR and operations—to set collaborative goals that break down silos and align cross-functional efforts.
Make progress visible—and celebrate it! Build dashboards or goal updates into team meetings. Transparency keeps everyone aligned and focused on outcomes—not just activity—while recognition reinforces alignment through action and shared success.
Refine the process. Track whether goals drive meaningful conversations, growth, and performance. Use each cycle to strengthen clarity, consistency, and connection.
Keeping alignment alive through conversations
Once goals are in motion, sustaining alignment depends on conversation. Even the clearest goals lose traction without regular feedback—the ongoing dialogue that keeps clarity alive and performance on track.
Thriving teams talk about progress often. They celebrate wins early, address confusion quickly, and adapt as business realities change.
HR’s role is to help managers build real-time alignment, creating a culture where coaching and feedback are natural parts of work.
Practical Guidance
Make feedback forward-looking. Shift from evaluation to enablement—from “what happened” to “what’s next.”
Create rhythm, not reaction. Encourage short, frequent, predictable touchpoints: what’s working, what’s blocking, what’s changing.
Coach in real time. Provide simple prompts managers can use on the fly: What's one thing you feel great about this week? What's one thing we could adjust to make this easier? Where are you feeling stuck?
Keep progress visible. Review progress in one-on-ones or huddles, connecting each milestone back to purpose.
"Quantum Workplace has brought teams closer together and aligned groups across common goals and objectives to share partnership and accountability. As a leader of multiple teams, across a broad array of functions, the tool has allowed me to not only be more organized in communicating with and aligning my direct reports, but also to have clear visibility to the communication, development, engagement, and recognition of all levels within my organization."
Read Scooter's Coffee case study >>
Turning employee feedback into clear insights
Listening is powerful—but only when it leads to understanding. Surveys, one-on-ones, and analytics reveal signals about engagement and performance, but without context, those signals go nowhere.
Your role as HR is to turn feedback into intelligence: curating, translating, and sharing insights that leaders can actually use. Empowerment begins when managers understand what the data means for them—and feel trusted to act on it.
Practical Guidance
Listen through change. Use pulse surveys before, during, and after major transitions to gauge clarity, confidence, and friction.
Translate, don’t just transmit. Summarize results with clear takeaways: What we heard. What it means. What’s next.
Equip managers with digestible insights. Provide focused reports and a few guiding questions to spark meaningful conversations.
Close the loop visibly. Share quick “you said, we did” updates. Small actions build big trust.
Removing barriers to performance
Performance doesn’t stall because people stop caring—it stalls when obstacles get in the way. Outdated processes, unclear ownership, or slow decision-making can erode motivation and momentum.
Employee feedback and performance data often reveal these hidden blockers—if leaders know where to look.
HR’s role is to help leaders listen, learn, and act: translating insights into changes that remove friction, build confidence, and empower teams to perform at their best.
Practical Guidance
Spot systemic blockers. Use engagement and performance data, feedback comments, and one-on-one insights to uncover recurring friction points—like delayed feedback loops, redundant approvals, or lack of clarity around decision-making.
Prioritize by impact. Focus on the barriers that most affect performance, retention, or confidence—especially those employees mention repeatedly.
Act collaboratively. Own what you can, influence what you can’t, and partner cross-functionally to resolve the rest. Empower managers to address issues within their teams, from process efficiency to clear communication about pay, promotions, and performance.
Test and learn. Experiment your way forward. Make a small tweak to a workflow or decision path, watch what improves, and share the learnings broadly.
Monitor for momentum. Reassess through pulse data, team feedback, or one-on-ones to confirm progress and identify new challenges early.
Building confident, insight-led managers
Empowerment comes to life when managers act with confidence. Data is only valuable when it fuels good decisions—and that depends on how easily managers can interpret and apply it.
Your role is to make data usable: giving managers frameworks, visibility, and examples that turn information into action. This helps create shared capability, equipping leaders across the business to lead consistently, clearly, and confidently.
Practical Guidance
Provide structure, not scripts. Offer templates and guides that make it easier to lead conversations and decisions.
Connect systems. Link engagement, performance, and development data so managers see context, not just metrics.
Use nudges and tools wisely. Automate summaries, recognition cues, or feedback prompts so leaders can effectively coach their people without a ton of admin work.
Model and celebrate action. Highlight examples where insights turned into tangible outcomes.
"At Monotype, engagement is no longer seen as an HR initiative—it's a company-wide mindset. HR is a catalyst, not the owner. We empower influential employees to lead change and then we get out of their way. That is what inspires REAL engagement."
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Making growth a daily practice
Most organizations have a few great coaches, but lack a coaching culture. Growth conversations usually happen once or twice a year — if that.
Thriving teams talk about growth regularly and in the flow of work. Managers help employees connect personal strengths and aspirations to business priorities.
HR's role is to make growth easier and expected—helping managers build skills and confidence in discussing growth with employees.
Practical Guidance
Normalize coaching as leadership. Position coaching as a manager’s most important job—not a bonus skill. Highlight and celebrate leaders who grow people, not just metrics.
Give managers prompts and practice. Offer lightweight frameworks with openers like “What’s energizing you lately?” or “What skill do you want to build next quarter?” Embed prompts into one-on-one templates to make reflection habitual.
Use the 70–20–10 lens. Remind leaders that growth mostly happens through work (70% experience, 20% coaching, 10% formal learning). Encourage stretch assignments and peer mentoring, not just courses.
Make coaching visible. Recognize managers who champion growth—through shoutouts, internal features, or peer learning circles. Culture shifts through visibility.
Turning reflection into action
Growth and development stall when purpose and opportunities are vague. “Work on development” isn’t actionable. Employees need a picture of where they can go and a few concrete steps to get there. Managers need a way to connect that back to the business.
HR's role isn't to create 1,000 custom programs — but to provide simple, shared structures everyone can use.
Practical Guidance
Start with reflection. Encourage employees to explore questions like: What energizes me most? What skills do I want to strengthen or learn next? Reflection builds self-awareness—the foundation of meaningful growth.
Visualize direction. Use frameworks or skill maps to help employees see multiple paths. Clarity isn’t rigidity; it’s helping people see what’s possible.
Connect individual and organizational goals. Tie each growth focus area to current business priorities. Ask, “How does this skill make our team stronger?” This alignment turns personal development into business value.
Make it tangible. Translate plans into short-term actions: projects, stretch assignments, mentoring, or cross-team collaborations. The more “in-the-flow” of work, the more sustainable the growth.
Revisit regularly. Growth plans shouldn’t gather dust. Encourage managers and employees to update focus areas quarterly—celebrating wins, refining goals, and setting new ones.
Developing for what's next
Growth can’t just serve today’s role. It has to build the capabilities your organization will need 12–18 months from now—especially with AI, shifting demographics, and harder-to-fill roles.
HR’s job is to connect individual development to organizational direction.
Practical Guidance
Make growth visible. Publish role pathways or skill maps that show how capabilities connect across the organization. Give people a glimpse into the possible opportunities for them in your organization.
Redefine career movement. Encourage lateral and cross-functional moves as legitimate, celebrated forms of growth. Employees stay 41% longer when internal mobility is strong.
Link development to business strategy. Tie learning goals to known capability gaps or future priorities. Show how today’s development fuels tomorrow’s innovation.
Use AI and tools to scale personalization. Integrate systems that recommend development actions based on role, goals, and strengths. Let technology remove the admin burden so managers can focus on coaching.
Invest in mentoring and peer learning. Build communities that exchange skills and knowledge across departments. Mentorship develops both mentees and future leaders.
"As a growing company, we're anticipating significant leadership transitions in the coming years. We can't just wait for leaders to emerge—we need to actively develop them. That means rethinking how we approach development, succession planning, and career progression."
Read Benesch case study >>
Making appreciation a daily habit
Recognition is one of the simplest ways to show people they matter — and one of the easiest to overlook.
Too often, appreciation lives at the corporate level: annual awards, milestone shoutouts, or a once-a-year thank-you post. Those gestures are meaningful, but they don’t make people feel valued every day.
Thriving teams weave recognition into the rhythm of work. They make it personal, timely, and tied to what matters most.
Practical Guidance
Define what to recognize. Tie appreciation to company values and measurable impact. When recognition reinforces business priorities, it strengthens both culture and performance.
Make it easy and frequent. Build recognition into tools people already use — Slack, Teams, one-on-ones — so it happens in the moment, not at the end of the quarter.
Empower peers. Encourage team members to recognize each other’s contributions. Peer recognition builds connection and belonging.
Train managers to personalize. Not everyone wants a public spotlight. Help leaders tailor recognition to individual preferences.
Creating clarity in how work is rewarded
Pay shapes trust more than almost anything else. Employees don’t expect identical compensation — but they do expect fairness, consistency, and clarity. When pay feels opaque, confidence erodes. When it feels transparent and earned, motivation grows.
Transparency doesn’t mean sharing everything — it means making sure employees understand how decisions are made and why they’re fair.
Practical Guidance
Separate the conversations, not the data. Hold performance discussions first—focused on growth and goals—then follow up with short, transparent pay updates.
Equip managers to talk about pay. Provide simple guides, talking points, and FAQs so they can answer questions clearly and confidently.
Audit for equity. Review pay data regularly by gender, race, and tenure. Address inequities quickly to reinforce trust.
Connect pay to contribution. Clarify what drives rewards — the results, skills, and behaviors that matter most.
Normalize the topic. Help managers make pay conversations routine, not uncomfortable. The more pay feels discussable, the more it feels fair.
Preventing turnover vs reacting to it
Retention is the ultimate sign that people feel valued. But most organizations act too late—after key employees are already out the door.
Thriving workplaces take a proactive approach, using data and dialogue to see risk early and act fast.
Retention isn’t just an HR metric—it’s a shared responsibility between HR and leaders. HR's role is to help surface insights to the right leaders at the right time, and help them take action.
Practical Guidance
Spot early signals. Combine engagement, performance, and growth data to find where retention or results might be slipping.
Focus on impact roles. Identify high performers and critical roles that make the biggest difference to your business.
Act fast. Encourage managers to have stay conversations, remove roadblocks, or re-energize career paths before frustration builds.
Use predictive insights. AI and analytics can help flag changes in sentiment, recognition, or development activity.
Share accountability. Include retention data and stay conversation trends in leadership dashboards. When everyone owns it, fewer surprises happen.
Despite a largely deskless workforce, Neovia continues to achieve a 90% survey participation rate across its global operations year after year. Workforce attrition has dropped by more than half, employee engagement and NPS scores reached record highs, and General Managers have reported high levels of engagement and team stability."
About Quantum Workplace
Quantum Workplace helps leaders build thriving teams that fuel business success.
We give leaders the clarity and confidence to act on what matters most—by unlocking talent insights across engagement, performance, and development.
Trusted by thousands of people-focused companies, Quantum Workplace makes it easier to keep teams aligned, empowered, growing, and valued on the path to business success.
