Hiring the right people in your organisation is by itself a monumental task, but the process doesn’t end once the hire ins your organisation.
It is extremely critical to train and engage these employees so that you can help them attain peak performance.
Apart from this, you also need to have a strategy in place to retain your talent.
And this is not HR departments responsibility.
In fact, the responsibility of retaining the best employees rests with the CEO or the leader of the organisation.
Table stakes
Having a good compensation and benefits package is table-stakes. If you falter here, you will not be able to retain any of your talents and in the long run, this proves to be more expensive than offering a good package in the first place. The compensation need not be just along monetary terms. You can explore to customize the package based on the needs of the individual as well.
Once you have the basics in place, there are three things that will help you retain your best talents.
There are three key strategies that leaders can use to ensure that they retain their best talent:
Train your managers
It is a well known fact that people often leave their mangers and not necessarily their organizations. Add to it, your managers define and maintain the culture of your organization and so it makes a lot of sense to train your managers well.
Train them to identify and nurture talent – the ability to recognize & praise good performance, coach when needed and reprimand when needed.
Provide them all the tools and authority needed to be able to perform a good job.
Train them to not hoard talent but to be free and open about letting their people grow in the organization.
Answer The “Why”
One way to answer the “Why should I care about this organization and stay here?” is to develop a vision with your team that you want to turn to reality.
This can be as audacious as John F Kennedy’s to put a man on moon and bring him back before the turn of the century or the “I have a dream” picture painted by Martin Luther King or being the most customer centric company on the planet goal of Jeff Bezos or as simple as to giving back to the society – through employment opportunities, investments in the local communities or even allowing each employee to choose their calling and contributing to it.
Just having this vision alone doesn’t help until you actively communicate where you are in the process and what is the next stop in the journey.
As long as your team believes that this is a worthwhile goal to achieve, they will remain united and motivated.
This is where good managers play a critical role.
Help them Grow
One of the ideas that hasn’t changed in a long time is that of the annual performance appraisal cycle. In times when consistency was more critical than adaptation, the annual cycles were of big help. However, in todays, ever changing Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) world, it is a good idea to dump the annual cycle and instead take a quarterly cycle of performance appraisals and goal settings.
Be ready to let your employees grow whenever they are ready rather than at specific time periods. By growth, I don’t necessarily mean promotions but growth in their areas of responsibility. Allow them to pitch to you or to their managers why they think they are ready to take on more responsibility and more often than not, allow them to take on more.
They might not be able to carry it off every but you will still benefit from having built a culture where initiative is respected. It will also allow you to identify good talent early and benefit from their drive and performances.
Conclusion:
I do know that these are not your typical strategies that you find when it comes to employee retention, but I have seen that these are fundamentally good strategies and have the added advantage of fueling the growth of you business in addition to allowing you to retain your talents.
