HR leaders feel positive about their outlook, but can’t back it up with numbers

Posted by News Room 13 October 2026
HR leaders feel positive about their outlook, but can’t back it up with numbers

Dive Brief:

  • While close to 85% of HR leaders told Betterworks they are “very” or “extremely” confident that performance management can help with organizational priorities, only 44% said they could provide business metrics to back up their position. The findings from the survey, conducted in August, come from a poll of 934 HR and business leaders.
  • Just over 30% of HR professionals said they could support their outlook with “some business evidence,” and less than 1 in 4 HR professionals said they could provide engagement metrics to support their claim.
  • Analysts at Betterworks characterized this phenomenon as high confidence with low evidence. What should HR leaders do if they suspect this is themselves? Work on getting the numbers, experts said.

Dive Insight:

“If organizations can’t show how performance improves execution, it becomes much harder to know what’s working, where to invest or how to improve,” Betterworks CEO Doug Dennerline said in a statement Oct. 6. “Closing that gap is only more important in today’s environment and requires executive leadership, managers, and HR to work together to make that impact visible.”

In light of recent findings, experts at Betterworks had several tips for HR, including nailing down three to five organizational outcomes that can be tied to performance management in 2027, switching from “review-completion” reporting to discussion of quantifiable progress on current goals and drilling down on whether a metric indicates correlation or causation.

Workplace experts have been saying that numbers are important for the past 10 years now. Long before the more-recent tech boom spurred by artificial intelligence and the demands of remote work, experts were emphasizing the importance of people analytics and creating a “culture of data.” Still, workplace experts urged HR to understand that a focus on these metrics should never lose sight of the human element of HR.

But a 2026 report from Cornell University suggested that numbers-heavy feedback may not translate best when it’s being delivered from the top down. Instead, narrative-focused feedback seems to do best. Given the wealth of information about business goals, performance reviews and how HR bridges the gap between people and their employers’ bottom line, a key takeaway here is striking the right balance between quantitative and qualitative.