One of the key concerns for Human Resource professionals and CEOs is how to retain and grow high potential high performers. According to a study carried out by LinkedIn, it’s the norm for today’s generation of professionals to change jobs at least four times within the first ten years of graduating. This rate is double the rate from previous generations.
The impact economically caused by failing to retain high performers is huge. However, luckily there are proactive steps that you can adopt to retain as well as grow your top performers. This article touches upon a few tips on proven talent management principles, best practices, and technologies that can help you retain your top performers.
1. Offer Clear Roadmap for Career Progression. Studies suggest that at any one time, one out of three employees is planning to leave their job within the next 12 months. This is mainly because they find their respective careers are not progressing as expected. Employees obviously feel more inspired, motivated, and engaged when they feel empowered with a certain degree of control over their career paths. Unfortunately, the majority of organisations are missing this key element to collaborate and helping them with career advancement. In fact, 68% of employees believe their managers are not involved in their career planning and development. While it may not be feasible for the business leaders and HR leaders to be involved in making career development plans for every employee, they can at least help in offering personalised development, learning and career planning opportunities which enable employees to take the reins of their career in their own hands.
Since only 32% of organisations are presently focusing on developing and retaining their current employees, it’s clear there room for improvement. If you can bridge the gap between employee development and succession planning, you can help your employees prepare themselves for potential roles of interest. For those individuals who are not ready yet for career advancement, you can assist them with detailed development plans which offer a roadmap to improve skills needed for new job positions. As an organisation, you can define learning paths and assign specific courses to enable their career advancement. If you provide your employees with proper tools, you can significantly reduce the flight risk of your top performers while promoting their growth and engagement.
2. Increase Engagement Means Increase Productivity. CEO’s recognise the significance of an engaged workforce. They realise the potential of an engaged workforce to drive the business performance, thereby impacting its bottom line. When you have employees who are engaged, they will be entirely focused towards the success of their organisation. When you have highly engaged employees, they are likely to stay back later at work if need be 2.5 times compared to non-engaged employees. They won’t hesitate to stay back for work even after their usual working hours. Highly engaged employees are also more than twice as likely to offer to help a colleague at work, even when not asked for. They are also 3 times likely to do something extraordinary for the organi=sation even when it is not expected out of them. Research supports the fact that torganisations with highly engaged employees have better financial performance, increased customer satisfaction, high levels of productivity, and most important, higher employee retention.
Another new way to keep your employees engaged and increase productivity is by offering meaningful and continuous performance feedback. The engagement of employees is three times higher when the managers take the initiative of regular check-ins with the employees. When a manager helps employees to set performance goals, employees are 17 times more likely to be engaged. By setting performance goals and offering timely feedback on progress, your employees are much more likely to be engaged, as it inspires them to perform better.
3. Make High Performance Your Culture. The best in class organisations are a class apart as they work towards developing a culture which lives & breathes high performance. In today’s business scenario, employees pay a lot of attention to the prevailing organisational culture along with salary and other benefits. With a well-designed system for rewarding performance, your employees will understand what they need to do to support the organisation’s objectives. It will make your employees much more accountable towards their work.
Listed below are some of the key HR technology components that are required to support a performance-driven culture
4. Performance Management: With the help of performance management, you can help to automate and standardise the goal setting and review process of your organisation. This assists in aligning employee development and goals with organisational objectives. With the help of automated performance management, you can direct the efforts of your employees for supporting the organisational goals, strategic initiatives, motivating them to enhance their performance.
5. Remuneration Management: With the help of compensation management you can budget, model, analyse, and execute your compensation policies in a simplified manner. It will help your organization to formulate and apply consistent and competitive compensations plans for all employees which will indirectly help in employee retention.
6. Incentive Compensation: With the help of incentive compensation, you can motivate your employees and also manage the financial rewards within your organization. It will help to streamline your incentive policy administration and also provide long-term planning for both performance and market-based plans. It will also help in bringing variable pay flexibility for your employees.
7. Recognition: Peer to Peer Recognition aligns nicely with continuous feedback and together offers an advantage over the annual review process. In the context of performance, Peer to Peer recognition encourages the right behaviors that support high-performance culture. In short, what gets recognised gets repeated.
8. Reporting and Analytics: With the help of reporting and analytics, you can provide accessible and secure cross-functional compliance reports. It will also help in maintaining audit trails of all your transactions about performance and compensation.
It is indeed challenging to create or change an organisation’s culture. However, the return that you achieve regarding time and energy invested makes these changes worthwhile. As leaders, you must understand when it’s time to change and pivot to remain relevant and adapt!