What does high performance actually look like in 2026?
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
Last Thursday we filled a room at Formetiq in Farringdon and asked one question: what does high performance actually look like in 2026?
It's a question every organisation thinks it has answered. Most answered it some time ago, and haven't looked again since.
We came at it from four angles over 45 minutes — the individual, the team, the organisation, and the one almost nobody designs on purpose: the environment all of it happens in. Our panel was Louise Hugkulstone, Mira Calvey and Adam Alexander, and they were generous, direct and refreshingly willing to disagree with each other.
Here's what stayed with us.
1. The first job on the ladder isn't disappearing. It's getting harder.
The evening opened with Revolut. A company that built its entire employer brand on working from anywhere announced in June that from 2027, its graduates and interns must be in the office three days a week. Everyone else stays remote. Finish the programme, and you go back to a remote contract.
That's not a return-to-office mandate. It's a company deciding that presence is a developmental tool rather than a productivity one, and applying it precisely to the group who need it most.
The data behind it is the interesting part. UK employers now estimate that around 39% of the work once given to a graduate is handled by software. The obvious conclusion is that those jobs go. That is not what the same employers think: 85% still call entry-level roles essential, and 96% expect them to become supervision roles rather than disappear.
So the first rung of the ladder isn't being removed. It's changing shape. The job is becoming checking, directing and taking responsibility for work that something else produced — which is a harder job than the one it replaced, not an easier one.
Which is quite a lot to ask of a 22-year-old sitting alone at a kitchen table.
2. The best group is not the most talented group
The night before our event, England lost their World Cup semi-final to Argentina. Thomas Tuchel had picked that squad for chemistry over star power — leaving out Foden, Palmer, Alexander-Arnold and Maguire, and saying openly that the best group is not necessarily the 26 most talented players. Plenty of people called it madness.
It made for a much better conversation than a win would have. Because the honest answer to "was he right?" is: probably, and it still wasn't enough. England went on to finish third — their best tournament since 1966 — beaten in the semi by two goals in the last five minutes.
The workplace parallel landed immediately. Most businesses recruit the most talented eleven they can afford and then wonder why the team doesn't function. Talent is necessary. It has never been sufficient. And building a team is a different discipline from hiring one — one that most organisations have quietly stopped resourcing.
3. The layer we depend on to build teams is the layer that's breaking
Which brought us to managers, and to the most sobering number of the evening.
Gallup's global report, published in April, puts employee engagement worldwide at 20% — a five-year low. Almost the entire decline sits with one group. Manager engagement fell from 27% to 22% in a single year, and is down nine points since 2022. Managers used to be more engaged than their teams; that gap has all but vanished.
We've stripped out their time, added AI adoption, restructures and attendance policy to their plate, and still expect them to build culture and develop people.
But the other half of the finding is the reason to be hopeful: in the best-performing organisations, 79% of managers are engaged — nearly four times the global average.
So this isn't weather. It's a choice, and some organisations are making it.
4. You can't mandate trust. You can design for it.
Here's what struck us about the first three conversations. Judgement. Trust. Mentoring. Shared standards. Managers with the capacity to lead.
You cannot order any of them into existence. No policy makes people trust each other. No mandate produces a good manager.
But there is one thing an organisation controls completely: the place where all of it either happens or doesn't.
A survey of 2,000 UK workers published this month found 83% are now in the office at least three days a week, 48% say it's where they're most productive, and 79% say it's where they feel closest to their team. The number that matters most for this conversation: 68% of under-30s say they now expect more from an office than they did before Covid — against 52% nationally.
Read that alongside the Revolut decision and the picture is clear. The youngest cohort is the one being brought back in — and it's the cohort with the highest expectations of what they walk into.
Follow the logic to its conclusion. If you're bringing people in three days a week so they can learn from others, the space has to be capable of delivering that learning. Bringing someone back into a room designed for solitary desk work in 2018 is arguably worse than not bringing them back at all. You've charged them the commute and delivered none of the benefit.
5. The best conversations happened after the panel finished
We'd budgeted 45 minutes for the panel and an hour for drinks afterwards. Nobody left. The conversation carried on for hours — people comparing notes on their own organisations, arguing about managers, swapping stories about offices that worked and offices that quietly didn't.
That was the point of the evening, and it's the bit you can't put on a slide.
Our panel
Louise Hugkulstone brought the design lens — how you build for a team rather than for a collection of individuals, and what a space designed for "us" has that a space designed for thirty "me"s doesn't. Connect with Louise on LinkedIn
Mira Calvey on the practical mechanics of sustaining performance without burning people out. Mira has made two resources available: The 7-Minute Reset, a free tool for resetting under pressure, and Calm Before Q4. Connect with Mira on LinkedIn
Adam Alexander on health, energy and resilience as the foundation of individual performance — and how to spot the difference between someone performing well and someone eighteen months from burning out. Adam has shared a free 2-minute Health Snapshot (12 questions, identifies where to focus first), a brochure for his Health, Performance & Resilience Programme for senior leadership teams, and an open calendar for a complimentary Lunch & Learn or team session. Connect with Adam on LinkedIn
Chaired by Liam Kurtsmith.
What's next
Thank you to everyone who came, and to Formetiq for hosting us. We'll be doing this again — if you'd like to be on the list for the next one, get in touch.
And if the fourth conversation was the one that resonated — the environment as an enabler rather than an afterthought — that's the work we do every day.
Sources: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026 (April 2026). Cognizant/Pearson study of 750 senior HR leaders (June 2026). FI Property Group national survey of 2,000 UK workers (July 2026). Revolut policy confirmed June 2026, applying to the 2027 graduate and intern intake.
