Are You Doing Enough to Retain Your Top Talent?
Leaders who excel at retaining star employees truly care about the people working with them. They help their most valuable contributors understand their capabilities and career goals, improve their performance, and gain access to the necessary sponsorship and support. Are you that kind of leader?
To assess how well you’re doing at retaining your top talent, please answer the following questions. Based on your answers, we’ll highlight applicable best practices and make specific recommendations about how you can further develop your talent-retention capabilities and resources. For additional information, read “Align with Your Star Employees.”
What percentage of your time do you invest in connecting, challenging, and developing your high potentials?
How do you identify top talent?
How do you understand the career goals of your top talent?
How do managers assess the capabilities of your top talent?
How do you craft the right development challenges for your top talent?
How do you reward your high potentials?
What do you use to track the effectiveness of your talent-management programs?
Based on your previous answers, how effective do you think your company is at connecting, challenging, and developing its top talent?
Results
Your answers indicate that your organization is not effective at connecting, challenging, and developing top talent. You’re currently at high risk of losing your star performers. In your company, executives are left to manage top talent with little support from human resources and the highest levels of management. To improve your chances of retaining top talent, make sure that you’re prioritizing these initiatives:
- Meet with leaders on an annual basis to identify top talent
- Discuss career goals with employees during performance reviews and align development plans accordingly
- Assess capabilities of top talent
- Use personally relevant non-monetary rewards to recognize top talent
- Assess employee engagement on a regular basis
Based on your answers, it appears that human resources has implemented talent management tools, but leaders must improve their utilization of those tools and better coordinate efforts across the organization to align with their stars. Your priority should be working with human resources to ensure that your organization is using the existing tools to the fullest. In the short term, you should focus on these five initiatives:
- Meet with leaders on a quarterly or semi-annual basis to identify and discuss top talent
- Actively engage with your high-potential employees to help them articulate their career goals
- Help your top talent understand their capabilities using 360-degree assessments, customized with the company’s leadership competencies
- Serve development opportunities on a "real-time" basis by sculpting positions to fit career goals
- Implement formal programs to pay for performance and customize other "non-monetary" rewards
Your answers indicate that your company is well positioned to align with its stars. But be careful not to get complacent. You should keep a close eye on traditional metrics (such as turnover, retention, and performance ratings) as well as employee engagement survey results, assessments of bench strength, and the performance of newly promoted and transferred high potentials. You should also seek advice from companies that are known for their leading-edge talent management practices.
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