Retention of Top Talent

The ability to retain your most valuable employees is critical to the success of your business. Convincing business cases have been made for the return on investment (ROI) achieved by keeping your best employees rather than having to recruit, hire and train their replacements.

There is also no shortage of articles giving some excellent advice and lists of things to do to retain your top talent. To oversimplify the situation it boils down to keeping them happy. But what does that mean? Below you will find a brief categorization of things we can do to meet this challenge. It’s important to keep in mind that although these are useful ideas based on the most prevalent practices, we are ultimately interested in retaining an individual. What is most important to an individual may be as distinct and different as they are themselves. One size may not fit all.

Full Engagement
  • Utilize their talents and skills
  • Fit the person to the job when hiring
  • Empower the person to do their job

    • Environment and Culture
  • Identify and execute on values
  • Show respect
  • Demonstrate trust
  • Act with fairness
  • Work/life balance
    • Flexible hours
    • Work-at-home
    • Commute time
  • Able to speak freely to express ideas
  • Friends become colleagues, colleagues become friends

    • Growth (Career and personal)
  • Learning
  • Training
  • Mentoring
  • Managing

    • Role
  • Clear expectations
  • Consistent and constructive feedback
  • Well managed (people often quit their bosses, not their jobs)

    • Reward and Recognition
  • Equitable pay
  • Reward high performance (individual and group)
  • Recognition is as important as the reward
  • Rewards do not necessarily need to be large, but should be equitable

    • If you think there is more you could be doing in this area, select one action you believe to be most appropriate and do it consistently.