Profile Your Top Performers to Define Your Recruiting Targets
An excellent way to define who are the people we’d like to recruit and retain is to profile the top 10% of your current employees. These are your top performers, the ones you’d like to keep. What are their interests? What do they read? What church do they attend? What are their hobbies? How do they behave? Then you can go about answering the question, "how do we find more of the people we want to keep?"
William Hendricks, Ph.D. from Overland Park, Kansas, suggests that we profile the top performers against the "four core business drivers" in any organization. This can help us describe top performance in behavioral terms. Those "drivers" are:
#1 Customer: customer service, spontaneous work at the task level, immediately responsive.
#2 Innovation: cutting edge thinking, new technology applications, creating the future, new market penetration and niche market success.
#3 Operational Excellence: cost containment, continuous quality improvement, quality work and understands systems.
#4 Spirit: growth, motivation, higher-order thinking and effort for the greater common good.
Advice for Keeping Your Top Talent
Fortune magazine recently surveyed organizations that have done a good job of keeping their star performers. The results are some valuable lessons in the war to retain good workers:
Foster a sense of family and community so the employees feel they are working for a cause as well as a company.
Pinpoint your business’ competitive advantage and integrate it into your recruiting and retention strategy. Make sure the H.R. function and the organization’s overall strategy are aligned at both an intellectual and emotional level.
Identify your best people and then invest heavily in their training and mentoring.
Make it easy to move within your organization.
Hire very selectively.
Allow all employees decision-making authority (empowerment).
Create the opportunity for employees to balance work and home life.
Smooth internal communications so that employees benefit from best practices elsewhere in the organization. Superior companies manage their knowledge well.
Do everything you can to make your employees feel welcome.
Develop a reputation as a market leader. Employees will see moving to a competitor as a step down.
Meet often with top performers
The best strategy for keeping your top performers on board is to meet with them often. Good managers, say the experts, get together with their high achievers at least once a month. These managers discuss performance problems, acknowledge good work, and ask employees what they'd like in order to feel more satisfied with their jobs. Frequent, regular meetings like this are much more motivating that a once-a-year performance appraisal.
-Adapted from "Best leaders retain key employees," by Diane Stafford,
in the Kansas City Star
Identify key people you'd 'Hate to Lose'
If you're concerned about retaining your top employees (and what manager isn't these days?) try this strategy from pharmaceutical giant Pharmacia Corporation: Create a "Hate to Lose" list of key employees. Make a point of calling everyone on the list regularly to find out how people are doing and what they need to stay productive and satisfied. This shows people you value them and want them to stay.
-Adapted from "The people factor in post-merger integration," by Victoria Griffith, in Strategy & Business magazine
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