Retaining Your Superstar Employees

Employee retention is essential to your business’s health, both internally and externally. They boost customer satisfaction, product sales, volume sales and ensure satisfied co-workers. In a perfect world, your star employees want to remain with the company. Here are some suggestions to keep those over achievers intact:

Managers are constantly interacting (or sometimes are not, which could be the problem) with employees and therefore have a large impact on employee performance. Its common for workers to leave managers rather than the job itself. The last thing you want is for a good employee who does enjoy the work but feels inclined to resign as a result of poor management ability. This is usually due to a lack of clarity of expectations, feedback on performance, structure of work and frequency of scheduled meetings. If you feel that more than one of these areas are slipping amongst certain departments, review and discuss them immediately. Any delay may incur a snowball of resignations. You want to create an environment where the employees feel like an asset to your company. No one will give 110% if they believe their position holds no value. It could be as simple as greeting them by name or acknowledging their contribution. You could ask for their opinion on the current efficiency of certain business processes, which may in turn improve company performance. Rewarding good work should be engrained into the company’s culture. Monetary bonuses are always nice, but sincere praise and recognition is more effective at creating loyalty.

It also helps to clarify the job description where necessary. Communicating this directly and clearly will give confidence to the employee, likely to result in improved individual performance. Of course, employees want to improve their skills and hopefully earn a larger salary as their professional lives move in to the future. That is why it is critical that there are opportunities to grow and learn, but perhaps even more important to make this known to current employees. Provide challenging and stimulating tasks. Believe in your employees with certain projects. Tap into their passion and ask what their career development plans are. Creating a supportive environment in which employees know their is room to advance in the company may just be enough to keep them around.

Take a look at your organisation and make note of your employees, superstar or not. Don’t exclude or forget anyone’s ability because at the end of the day, they all have potential to be the very best in the company.