Encouraging Top Employees
Posted January 13th, 2014
Keeping your top employees happy and engaged is critical to your company’s success; losing them to a competitor means you lose all of their knowledge, skills and drive.
Read below for some tips on how to encourage your top employees.
- Look beyond the employees’ skill sets. With a bit of training, could these employees learn more skills? With some mentoring and/or training, could they grow into a larger role with your firm?
- Remain flexible. Perhaps a star employee wants to move from sales to operations. Let him/her take the leap, letting the star know that he or she could return to sales at some later time. Let your star or top employees have a little “play” time. That is, let the employees pursue additional projects outside of their stated job duties. Instead of encouraging busywork, let an employee work on a personal (but work-related) project.
- Meet with these stars to find out what aspects of their work they find most fulfilling and work to help them have more of these fulfilling tasks or parts of their work take up more of their day-to-day work life.
- No matter how large or small your company is, have some sort of mentoring program for your stars. It can be a formal program or one where your more experienced managers take a star or two under their wings for mentoring and advice.
- Your company should have some sort of promotion plan in effect for your superstars. That is, they should know what they can become and where they can go within your organization should they stay with you and continue to shine. Again, every business no matter how large or how small should have some sort of roadmap available to top employees that will show them what they can expect from their hard work and abilities. It gives them something definite to shoot for.
- A gutsy thing to do is to ask your stars to create what could be called their “dream resume,” even if their dreams have nothing to do with their jobs at your firm. Then, if possible, see if you can help them grow the skills they would need to get to those dream careers. Yes, this may push some people out the door when they can see the attainment of their dream at some place other than with you, but one company who tried this (the creative/tech agency MRY), experienced a retention rate of 75 percent between 2008-2013.
If you’re looking for your next stars, let Bayside Solutions help you find them. We can help your San Francisco-area company find skilled and reliable talent for your temporary, temp-to-hire and direct-hire opportunities. We look forward to hearing from you.
