How to Retain Top Talent Today!

Unfortunately, there is no set formula when it comes to retaining top talent because no two employees are ever the same. There are however certain guidelines that must be followed to ensure that you mitigating the risk of losing your best employees. Each employee has a specific combination of drivers that motivate them to invest their talents and energies in a company. Taking the time to discover what your employees need to thrive will help you to retain top performers and develop them into the future leaders of your company.

Here are some tips to help keep your employees motivated, engaged and committed to your business.

1) Reward and Recognize

Recognizing and rewarding accomplishments is one of the most powerful retention strategies. Boost your employees’ visibility by publicly recognizing them at staff meetings or through a business-wide email. Taking the time to say a genuine thank you is also an easy and effective way to make people feel valued and appreciated for their efforts. Compensate your employees for their hard work with appropriate monetary rewards (such as a salary increase or bonus) or non-monetary incentives (such as the opportunity to lead a new project) to assist with career progression.

2) Empower and Enable

For employees to succeed in their role, a sense of personal ownership in their work is essential. Provide a clear understanding of deliverables and time frames, and then give them the space to decide how that work gets completed.

3) Challenge and Develop

Opportunities for growth and advancement are key to retaining your top performers. High achievers tend to be life-long learners, so be sure to provide ongoing training to keep their skills up-to-date and advance them to their next promotion. Challenge your staff with new responsibilities and allow them to lead projects where they can be stimulated and acquire new skills.

4) Schedule regular feedback discussions

Give time to your high performers as you would underperformers. That means scheduling time for regular and meaningful feedback discussions. Approach the conversation with the preparation you would any other. Look back upon recent work that’s been performed and ask how you can help. It becomes massively important to open up avenues of growth for high performers through feedback, especially when one of the main reasons high performers leave is a result of poor management.

5) Recognize strengths and areas for improvement

What many of us don’t realize is that top performers might not always want to hear they’re doing great and nothing else. While it’s important to recognize their strengths and contributions, consider how they can also improve in their respective roles and grow to fill new gaps within your organization. According to the Harvard Business Review, “the quickest way to encourage a top performer to start looking for a job elsewhere is to tell them there is nothing that you need to work on.”

6) Understand the individual’s personal and professional goals

Recognize the need for your high performers to grow both personally and professionally. Based on Havard Business Review’s database of over 4 million leaders, “the highest ranked behavior of our top performers is a commitment to self-improvement.” While unsurprising, as a manager, you need to know what these goals are to help. Make sure to ask these questions regularly during feedback discussions.

7) Share future growth opportunities

Present relevant growth opportunities within the organization to your high performers. This is why in the previous steps, you want to find out where they stand and what their growth goals are. Having this knowledge helps managers uncover the right opportunities to share. One thing to be wary of is over committing to the internal opportunities that can be provided. If there are specific needs for opportunities that are not within your span of control, don’t create distrust by agreeing to something you’re unable to facilitate.

8) Follow-up with any action items

Always, always, always follow-up with any action items after a feedback discussion. As a manager, anything you’ve promised to deliver should be held accountable for, as would your direct reports. If you’ve agreed to come back with resources or suggestions for growth opportunities, understand that is something you will need to deliver at your next meeting.

As a manager, it’s important to keep your top talent challenged with ongoing feedback. Recognize that you can make or break their decision to leave the team. It’s a matter of supporting under performers with guidance and high performers with self-improvement opportunities they wouldn’t find elsewhere

Finding and retaining TOP Talent is no easy process and the cost of getting it WRONG can be severe for any company.

Emerging Search Consultants has a proven track record and recruitment methodology that works. We have worked with companies from around the world and have placed only the highest calibre of candidates.

If you need any help getting it right from the start then please reach out to [email protected]