All high performance environments share
a serious devotion to results. They’re competitive, stressful workplaces where
mediocrity is disdained and failure intolerable. Moreover, individuals who
thrive in these environments tend to be A players with intense ambition. And
they are always on the lookout for greener pastures.
How can high-performing employers
better retain these critical employees?
The challenge is often how companies
approach retention — reactively. Retention issues are ignored until the company
suspects an employee might bail, at which point it’s addressed by offering the
employee some kind of enticement to stay, and then it’s back to business as
usual. This approach might work in the short-run, but does nothing to cultivate
longer-term loyalty.
A better approach is to address
retention proactively, as a strategic issue. I recently connected with two
thought leaders in talent management strategy to discuss how to do this in high
performance environments. Based on our conversation, here are five things any
organization can do to proactively combat turnover.
1.
Hire Retainable Employees
The pressure’s on from day one in a
high performance environment. While some thrive under pressure, others will
falter. Elissa Tucker, Human Capital Management Knowledge Specialist at APQC, says the first thing leading
organizations are doing to curtail this type of turnover is a focus on “hiring
retainable employees.”
While there are some obvious
indicators of a candidates’ ability to deliver consistently (e.g. three to five
years’ tenure in a similar role), there are other signals that can provide
insight in your sourcing and screening.
Tucker suggests working with your
managers and top performers to identify what backgrounds, skills or personality
characteristics your retainable employees have in common.
2.
Plan Careers, Don’t Fill Roles
It’s easy to focus on the near-term
when managing people in a high performance environment. You bring in “A
Players” with the expectation that they’ll succeed in the role for which you’ve
hired them–and unrealistically assume they will stay in that role forever. Your
top performers are thinking about their career, and you should be too.
“Best-practice organizations work to
help individuals plan to stay with the organization–to plan their careers with
the organization,” says Tucker.
The key is to guide your employees
in mapping out how they can attain their career goals within your company. For
example: If a top salesperson sees her current role as a rung in the ladder up
to senior management, outline some long-term goals that will get her there. If
another is just in it for the money, keep him in challenging roles that will
reward him for working hard and allow him to play hard.
3.
Make Retention Personal
Every employee is motivated by
different things, and retention strategies thus need to be tailored down to the
individual level.
Steve Miranda, Managing Director of CAHRS, Cornell University ILR School, says, “The key phrase is specialized efforts.” Successful
organizations, he says, don’t view retention initiatives as “one size fits
all.”
Instead, they’re making retention
strategies personal. How? By simply asking, “What motivates you?”
You may be surprised to find that
monetary incentives are low on the list of responses you get. These days, “A
Players” are more concerned with challenging work, personal and professional
growth opportunities, work/life balance, and workplace flexibility.
4.
Get to the Heart of Underperformance
Let’s face it: Underperformance
happens, but you don’t want to lose employees who were previously strong
performers. If you notice a drop in performance, Miranda advises against
writing them off without first getting to the heart of the issue.
In my conversation with Miranda, we
broke underperformance down into a few root causes:
Skill and competency issues often come up when someone’s been promoted into
a role they weren’t quite ready for. Fortunately these can be addressed with coaching
and training–and usually for a fraction of the cost of replacing an employee
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