How can you keep top employees?

This is a very complex question. The answer depends on the organization we are talking about, its core business and its history. Leaders and specially middle managament are the most impactful ones that should act with people from HR and employer branding. Understanding what your people truly need is the only way to keep them. Some people just want to be able to focus on work, some want to belong, some want to contribute to a huge change in the world and some want to be able to have flexibility and work from anywhere in the world.

Recognition and feedback are crucial components of employee engagement. To retain top employees, you need to offer the promotion the employee deserves. Here, salary hikes play a major role. Considering the employees' key deliverables achieved, the management needs to formulate a plan for the next 2-3 years. Basically, you need to show how the employees' career paths will flow in the organization. Speak about the employees' strengths and assign new responsibilities accordingly.

To retain top employees, focus on: Competitive Compensation: Offer fair salaries and benefits. Career Development: Provide opportunities for growth and advancement. Recognition and Rewards: Regularly acknowledge and reward achievements. Work-Life Balance: Support flexible schedules and personal needs. Engaging Work Environment: Foster a positive, inclusive culture. Open Communication: Maintain transparent and supportive dialogue. These strategies help create a fulfilling and supportive work environment that encourages top talent to stay.

Leaders who appreciate, encourage, engage and empower employees establish a productive work environment and get better results. Acknowledging and developing talent indicates the strength of a culture. Highlighting successes and contributions is vital to celebrating victories by demonstrating that your team matters. Employees can feel valued and perform their best work.

Firstly Identifying top talent itself is actually tough because you will find disengaged and low potential part of the top talent due to favouritism. 1) Fix the metrics you use to identify top talent 2) Give them challenging tasks, mostly related to transformation 3) you'll find people who can handle chaos and motivate people without influence 4) now that you Identified top talent, put a target on how many can u retain, be reasonable, as u cant retain all, like 70% of your top talent 5) If you can engage through growth and learning , and identify successors, you'll be able to generate new leaders through these top talent ; even if u lose top talent u have backup

The top employees are crucial for the long-term success of any organization. Strategies to retain best talent: Competitive Compensation - Ensure that your top employees are fairly compensated. Regularly review and adjust their salaries to match industry standards. Recognition & Appreciation- Recognize & appreciate your top employees for their hard work and achievements. Career Development - Provide opportunities for growth. Offer mentoring, & coaching sessions. Work-Life Balance - Promote a healthy work-life balance offering flexible work arrangements,& reasonable working hours. Challenging Projects - Assign top employees to challenging & meaningful projects that align with their skills & interests. This keeps them engaged & motivated.

While this depends on the scale of the organization, I'll talk about what worked for me in my small business. I run a corporate gifting business with 100+ employees. I have picked my top 10 leaders and I ensure I spend quality time with them, helping them grow in their professional careers. I guide & mentor them, I empathise with them, I challenge them. I'm there if they are even going through some personal challenges...

To support top employees, leaders must be intentional in their approach. This involves creating career paths for employees to explore new opportunities and develop skills, which can be accomplished through mentoring, job rotation, training, coaching, and networking opportunities. It also requires identifying skills that need improvement and implementing development programs to help the employees grow. Managers should align performance with employee expectations and identify top employees who go above and beyond. Action plans should be created for career progression, investing in career development and succession planning. This reinforces top performance and creates an exciting culture for employees, while future-proofing the business.

Learning and development is something that is very important nowadays, especially for younger generations. That's why companies should be very open to various learning models, to new organizational development, paying special attention to the individual growth and development and potential of each employee. The company should provide access to modern tools, inhouse trainings, various seminars, conferences. My advice is to ask your employees what their interests are and what they need for development.

Whilst some people leave bad managers, rather than bad jobs it is not the only reason people quit! In good workplaces, managers do make a great difference. One way you can enhance talent retention is by enabling high trust leadership behaviours. Staff don’t want to feel like they are being micromanaged or constantly feeling watched or monitored. If your recruit people with the skills, character and experience to do a role, you will be able to give staff the trust, flexibility and autonomy they need to be agile and innovate. This is a win-win situation for staff and employers, and will drive retention.

There's a fantastic book around the motivation of employees called Drive by Daniel Pink. It states 3 motivators of individuals as Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. Do not underestimate Autonomy, the responsibility to achieve goals, but also to make mistakes and learn. Learn how to delegate effectively to empower employees to be the best version of themselves!

High achievers are used to taking initiative, so giving them ownership and flexibility over their work is paramount to retaining them as employees. Ownership is the ultimate driver for motivation, so be sure you're creating space for your top talent to share, pursue, and implement new ideas.

The culture piece is huge. Employees will often stay not because of a salary but because of culture — because they are in a place where they are valued, and where they feel like they fit in. Having a close friend or two, aligning with the mission / vision, and having respect for leadership will do wonders for retention.

To keep your top and actually all your employees on board you need to intrinsically align them. It's about the degree of connection between who you are, what you value, and what you want to contribute to the world as an individual with the DNA of the company and the work. - (Believe) It is important that employees can live the values, principles and also the mission of the company. When intrinsically connected you have a valuable reason to stay, be engaged and find meaning in the work.

Aligning work with values, and work that supports those values (diversity, social impact) is paramount in driving top employees development and achievements. This strategy promotes emotional connection, buy-in and growth of employees while aligning their progress with the company's overall values and purpose.

Getting the right people who are aligned with your company values is the first step to aligning employee work with the company goals/purpose/mission. Make sure you LIVE those values, as words on a website are not enough to align the best people with them, companies that live and breathe their values will keep and engage those that are aligned.

Stay interviews work wonders. These are regular conversations with employees to learn about their goals. 1. What's keeping them in the job? 2. What do they want to do in the future? I learned about this the hard way. A fantastic employee left because she received an unsolicited offer for a great job that paid a lot more money. Hard to blame her and we remained on great terms. But I would have seen it coming if we had more regular conversations about her career goals. I did this when I hired her replacement, who is still with the same company 20 years later.

At the end of the day, top talent wants to work with top talent. In my experience, when you ask high-performers what they like most about their work, they often cite the people. So after you do all the basic things (recognition, pay, career growth), the next most important thing is making sure you have a culture of excellence and accountability.

Engagement is not just top down. Give opportunities for your employees to have a VOICE. Is one of your team a budding social influencer who coudl create a company podcast? Is one of your team passionate about a particular benefit that could be a champion for that benefit? Do your top performers have a platform to share how they became a success? Yes, leaders should communicate the message, but entry level/new starters voices are just as compelling - and more likely to be engaged from the outset!

Keeping top employees requires recognizing their value and nurturing their growth. I've learned that competitive compensation is important but it's not the sole factor. Top employees seek a sense of purpose in their work and opportunities for advancement. Providing ongoing learning and development programs can help retain them. Cultivate a positive work environment that fosters collaboration, respects their contributions and offers a healthy work-life balance. Additionally, regular feedback and acknowledgment of their achievements go a long way in keeping top talent engaged and committed to the organization. It's about creating an environment where they feel valued, challenged and motivated to stay.

Listen to them. I've seen so many companies where the employees are being loud and definitive about their needs and issues while management was still having endless meetings trying to brainstorm what the issues could be. Your staff -especially your top talent- knows what they need to stick around. They also usually have some great ideas on how to make it happen. Listen to them.