Retaining Top Talent - Tips for the HR Professional and Managers

A 2024 study found that less than 50% of employees felt supported as they tried to progress their careers. For top talent, this support is absolutely critical! Another recent study showed only 50% of participating employees saw meaningful opportunities for advancement within their current organization.

At Spark’d, our research clearly shows that a sense of Career Progress is instrumental to developing a passionate work experience. And, when employees are passionate, retention rates are well over 90% for top talent.

Although no one can own your career but you, organizations can make it easier or harder for employees to use career progress as fuel for passion at work. In our experience, HR can make a world of a difference by sponsoring and developing initiatives that are easy to execute but have maximum impact on engagement and retention.

From our best practice research, there are three simple, yet powerful, activities that HR departments can promote and support:

1.?????? Hold annual, dedicated career conversations: Encourage and reward managers for hosting an annual 30-60 minute career conversation with each of their direct reports and, certainly, for their top talent. (Separate from performance reviews.) Assign homework that ensures that both the manager and the employee have reflected and prepared for the conversation. Four straightforward questions form a great foundation for a conversation!

i.????????? What are my/the employee’s strengths?

ii.?????????What are my/the employee’s development needs and how are they being addressed currently?

iii.?????????What are your longer-term career aspirations? Or, what could the employee consider as a fulfilling career path?

iv.?????????What do you think you need to be doing to reach your career goals? How can I (the manager) help?

Ensure the critical next steps sit with the employee and the manager’s role is supportive. It’s critical that the employee be the driving force behind any career plan or activity.

2.?????? List and promote career development activities: Developing and promoting a large list of career development activities that are accessible and achievable within your organization will help the above conversations and other aspects of career planning tremendously. Promote a large range of activities that should include but not be limited to:

·?????? Developing skills

·?????? Increasing industry knowledge

·?????? Growing one’s reputation through project or thought leadership

·?????? Expanding one’s exposure to influencers and executive leadership

·?????? Improving one’s portfolio through new assignments

·?????? Requesting a lateral move to learn a different aspect of the business

The days where promotion and salary increases are synonymous with career progress are gone. This is a challenge for many top performers who work hard and want recognition and rewards for achieving successful outcomes. But today’s organizations are flatter and leaner. To feed engagement and passion in a sustainable manner, career progress needs to be marked and celebrated by many types of “wins” and achievements and not restricted to traditional milestones that may take years in the making.

Ensure your managers and employees have easy access to a long list of career development activities to help them navigate their careers within your organization. For your top talent, consider a list of more exclusive opportunities that are “earned” and so have more cachet attached to them. Examples are special secondments or overseas assignments or executive programs at prestigious universities.

3.?????? Spotlight career progress moments: Using your communication channels to effectively and consistently promote what career progress looks like within your organization is a simple task, when integrated into your existing communication plan. Keeping the stories short and sweet will ensure these communications are not heavy lifting for anyone on your team.

Overtime, such stories will educate your top talent, as well as your entire workforce, on the range of career success moments & milestones available to them within your organization.

The purpose of such communications is to provide perspective and help top talent, as well as employees generally, broaden their view of career progress.?

To keep it really simple, consider setting up a chat channel dedicated to career progress celebrations. Maybe even call it Career Moments & Milestones! Here are some client examples:

“We want to give a shout out to Taylor for their wonderful work on the ESG committee and onboarding our new partner!”

“Let’s all congratulate Jamie for the excellent work they did leading our new product competition!”

“Join me in applauding Chris for achieving their project management certification!”

“Cheers to Alex for upgrading their status to Scrum Master!”

To Wrap It Up

Never take your high performers for granted and allow the majority of your attention to be drawn to underperformers. Losing top talent comes at significant cost. Most HR professionals know this all too well. Some estimate replacing top talent has a 400% price tag (4X the high performer’s salary that is), if you can actually find a strong replacement!

Creating meaningful and easy-to-execute ways of enhancing formal career development programs and processes can go a long way to retaining top talent! Share your ideas and practices with us at [email protected] and we’ll share them in our next post on this topic!

Join us for our upcoming webinar: "The Blind Spot in Engagement Surveys That's Costing You Top Talent."Click here for details and registration: Webinar Link