Empower Top Performers

The key relationship in ensuring top performer retention is an employee’s direct manager. Today, many organizations are identifying their top performers and creating retention plans for these key employees.  In a recent article from Talent Management.com, author Craig Seebach discusses how this effort is being put into place in foresight of the coming economic rebound.

A May 2010 Harvard Business Review article titled “How to Keep Your Top Talent” revealed that “12 percent of all the high potentials in the companies they studied said they were actively searching for a new job – suggesting that as the economy rebounds and the labor market warms up, organizations may see their most promising employees take flight in large numbers.”

Several studies show that the top nonfinancial incentive for retention and job satisfaction was praise and recommendation from an immediate manager. All the data points to the demand and need for empowering, encouraging front-line staff. What can companies do to empower a supervisor to keep employees engaged and motivated?

It is critical that companies make employee development a priority by helping managers focus on conducting regular coaching sessions with their staff.

Supervisory staff should also be provided with the necessary tools to review employee performance and recognize specific areas of success, including opportunities for growth. There are various new workplace technologies that can help managers allocate their time and energy in an appropriate manner. These new technologies allow your front-line staff to spend more face-to-face time with their employees. Here are a few suggestions to help managers:

Liberate Managers from Administrative Overhead: workforce optimization technologies can free up a manager’s time for direct coaching and one-to-one development of resources.

    Enable Specific, Actionable Performance Discussions: key performance indicators measured an displayed via advanced workplace technologies cab be role-specific and organization-specific, allowing management to align individual goals with strategic company goals.

      With top talent on the verge of fleeting with a recovering economy, allowing managers to spend more time with their employees is one approach to locking in top performing managers. Another highlight of giving your managers the tools to hold fact-based, quantified discussions on performance with their employees is that the top talent continues to be engaged with your organization. And that means one step ahead of the “abandon ship” mentality. To read the full article, click here.

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