Keeping Top Talent
by Allen Jones

Employee retention is a hot-topic for 2004. Putting together an effective strategy to encourage your top employees to stay with you is critical to maintaining your competitive edge.

As we enter 2004, economic indicators are positive, your company is becoming more profitable, and you're hiring again…at the same time, you also notice a growing trend; slowly, but surely, your best employees seem to be leaving whereas your mediocre performers are sticking it out like they plan to stay with you for life. Over the past few years, employees, seeing the rocky employment climate of the recession, often first hand, have been weathering out the storm by staying put with their employers, often times regardless of their job satisfaction. As the economic skies brighten, the first to take the initiative to set sail for new horizons tend to be those same people that you often lauded for their "proactivity" on the job. Even if they haven't begun an active job search, they often have developed a reputation for high performance that causes others to seek them out.

Over the past few years, performance, quality, service have remained the big focuses for many companies. Often topics like morale and employee retention have been given lip-service, but no concrete action plans have been put in place. Employee retention is becoming more and more a hot topic as we move forward into the post-recession world. It involves a lot more than just offering employees a few free meals and requiring them to participate in often belittlingly juvenile team-building games.

Effective employee retention involves forming a specific, measurable plan of attack. The following six areas are the places to start.

1. Compensation Plans: For many organizations, the entire concept of employee retention boils down to one topic—compensation. "To keep our best employees, we must pay them well" is the cry. Up to a point, this is true—but only as a negative. If you don't pay your top performers well, they'll surely leave. But only paying them well does nothing to ensure that they will stay. Offering a competitive compensation plan is the entry fee required to play the employee retention game. You will need to construct the other elements of your retention strategy to take over from your compensation plan as motivators.

2. Recognition Programs: Designed and implemented correctly, recognition programs can play an important role in retaining top employees. Handled badly, they can be embarrassing irrelevancies, disdained by the employees, and rapidly fall into disuse. It is important that your recognition programs, in addition to any operational goals to which they may be focused, have traceable, direct impact on your retention goals.

3. Recruiting: Nowadays, employees are not looking for lifelong employment; they are looking toward their own growth. "I will come to work for you, so long as you make me more employable and pay me a fair salary. I will remain with you so long as I am being challenged and developed as an individual" is the new mantra of employees today. Do your company's employment literature, web site, interviewing procedures, and other employment resources offer an adequate balance of information on the personal and career development opportunities of which the potential employee might be able to take advantage?

4. Orientation: First impressions count. In a new employee's first few days, the organization establishes the employer-employee relationship and sets the direction in which the employee will travel. If the organization is out of alignment with its employees at this point, there can be no surprise if weeks, months, or years later it finds that it has missed its retention targets. People stay where they feel at home and where they feel their contributions matter. The key to ensuring that employees start off in the right direction toward your retention goals is effective orientation.

5. Managing: The key relationship in retention is the relationship between the employee and his or her manager. Get it right and acceptable retention is almost assured. Get it wrong and everything else will count for naught. The employee's manager is responsible for completing the onboarding process, setting challenging goals, implementing a relevant performance appraisal process, offering the employee desired training and development, and providing a buffer for the employee when needed. They represent the organization, offer coaching and leadership, build morale, and provide the example for work-life balance.

6. Mentoring: If you manage top performers, a mentoring program is not optional. Whether or not your organization has a formal mentoring program, your key employees expect you to offer them ongoing growth opportunities such as this. Mentoring programs give the employee a greater sense of satisfaction and fulfillment, a heightened sense of responsibility, a desire to stay with the relationship, and a greater sense of bonding with the organization. For an employee to receive the full benefit from the mentoring relationship, the mentor must be someone with whom he or she can be wholly relaxed, outside of the management process.

Effective retention is about people, not strategies. When you implement your strategy, focus on the people. What works? What doesn't? Who's content? Who's discontent? What's causing the discontention? Address those.

Today, the average employee stays at a job 3.8 years. The world has changed. Keeping top performers forever is a bit unrealistic.

Let me illustrate this with an analogy. I live in Atlanta, Georgia. Whenever I travel to a client's office or off to the airport, I have to contend with the ubiquitous gridlock that grips our roadways. When I first moved here ten years ago, as I sat stuck in traffic, my temper would flare and I would mentally shout obscenities at the other drivers adding to my plight. Once I finally admitted to myself that no matter how much emotional energy I expended, the traffic would still be there, my stress level began to go down. I had to realize that, even before I got into my car, this would be part of my life. I just needed to plan accordingly, relax, and go with the flow.

The reality of business today is that good employees will leave. You can either stress about it each time it happens, or come to realize it is simply a fact of life in the new economy and make sure you are offering your employees a challenging and enjoyable work environment for as long as they are with you.

In implementing a retention strategy, keep in mind that the objective is not to prevent good employees from leaving the organization. Whatever you may do, top performers will still reach a stage in their careers when they believe it's right for them to move on, some hiring decisions will turn out to be wrong and sometimes the employer-employee relationship just won't work. Just remember to keep the door open for top employees who leave. Who knows when they might want to come back?

Allen Jones
640 Glen Iris Drive #301
Atlanta, GA 30308

404.881.6120
Email: ajones@mindspring.com