How to Keep Your Top Performers

Can you afford to lose your top performers? The market today is different and strong talent, especially technology employees, can easily find another company to entice them away. What do you need to keep your employees fully engaged and not tempted to leave?

You need to be consistently recruiting your current employees!

Listen
Employees want to be heard and a manager who is skilled in listening to each person will increase their ability to keep their best employees. Here are some thoughts on how to connect with each person.

Do you discuss with each employee what is working and not working for them?
Check in once a quarter to make sure that your employees can express what they need to be fully engaged.
Are the challenges in their current responsibilities frustrating or exciting?
Do your team members feel comfortable coming to you to discuss issues or projects?
Are you recognizing employee’s contribution?

Compensation
Where do you stand in the market for compensation? If you have senior people, know their market value and, as soon as you can, keep their compensation close to those levels. Be transparent with employees, letting them know, especially if you are a startup, that their compensation will be adjusted to match the growth of the company.

Career Growth
If you are offering a great learning environment for everyone, then your employees will probably be interested in staying. If the employees can’t grow, even with great compensation, they will probably start looking for another opportunity. Find out what excites them and areas of growth they want to develop.

Signs to Watch

Start taking off time for some part of the day. Longer lunch hours or calling in sick.
They change the normal clothes and are dressing up.
They no longer seem as attentive and are not asking as many questions. Doing just enough work to maintain a level of performance.
More quiet in meetings.
Are they pushing to complete work because they want it done so to leave on good terms.
Other team members seem frustrated about the employee’s response time.
They complain more.
Stepping out to take more personal phone calls

What to Do
As soon as you start to see potential signs that an employee is disengaging, step in immediately and engage them in conversation. Check in with them to see what is demotivating them. Is the job too stressful, not challenging or not enough compensation. Most employees want to contribute and do their best, so figure out a way to eliminate issues that disengage them.

Be well,

Pat

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