How To Retain Your Best People

IAs businesses grow over the years, they swiftly notice the staff members that have the potential to become a world-class talent. Whether they’re top billers or have turned a team into one of the company’s best assets, keeping these people in the business can have benefits that can’t be measured in profit margins alone.

How to retain your best people

A strong team don’t just contribute to a business’s bottom line, it can also go a long way to help with the hiring of new members. Knowing that a company has a talented team can help potential staff see the value of the culture and this can entice waves of skilled candidates.

World-class talent has plenty of long-lasting benefits for a business and while this can continue long after they’ve moved on, determined businesses will want to make sure they retain their best staff.

Organise regular appraisals with realistic goals

While retention is a company-wide effort, the managers and supervisors throughout a business have an important role to play. The best work can only be produced when staff are receiving feedback and know what their strengths and weaknesses are.

Regular appraisals that focus on each staff member’s career can go a long way to encouraging the best people to stay. Everyone in a business has different ambitions and wants to know how they can continue to climb their career ladder. An appraisal is the best time to set out unique targets and offer new ways to develop individual careers.

Through the use of appraisals, a company can help each individual create and develop a clear, transparent and meritocratic career path. If a member of your company knows what their journey within the company is, they may be more inclined to stay with you and reap the forecasted rewards while building their skills.

Setting up and sticking to a frequent appraisal schedule that creates a clear roadmap of progression can ensure all your teams know their value and targets. Many people look for a new opportunity as they feel like their progression has stalled and they need a new challenge is needed to kickstart their career. By providing this challenge, companies could quickly see staff turnover figures drop.

Make sure you know your sector’s figures

The best talent doesn’t come cheap and paying below the going rate is going to send ambitious candidates elsewhere—even if a company boasts a great culture. Ensuring staff are always paid a figure close to or even above the industry average can go a long way to making them feel valuable to the business. The best talent can help to increase bottom lines, so investing some of these gains back into salaries is more than worthwhile.

Organising frequent pay reviews and helping staff know just what they need to do for a raise can help motivate the entire business as they strive to meet their targets, helping the company grow and thrive.

Conduct proper exit interviews

However hard you work to keep hold of your team, people leaving a business is an inevitability. Whether it’s due to a change of scenery or career, businesses should be using this as an opportunity to learn more about themselves, why this person decided to leave and what could have been done to prevent it.

Exit interviews allow a company to discover the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of their business. Going into these meetings with an open mind can create an honest conversation and constructive feedback which can be taken into account moving forward.

While it may seem like reaching the exit interview stage is too late to try and retain the business’ best talent, the reality is that it provides a proactive approach that helps a business act upon any areas that its staff are unhappy with. Alongside this, a good exit interview could even help you to change a leaving employee’s mind if you tackle issues and reach a compromise.

However, getting your biggest talents into an interview shouldn’t just happen during exit interviews. Whether it’s due to high performance or an annual interview, talking to your employees can help you understand the key employer groups, realise the needs of your employees and gather real employee advice on how the culture can grow.

Empowerment is the key

The biggest and best talent thrive off tackling new challenges and being given the opportunity to grow their careers. So, while a strong culture and beneficial perks will entice professionals, companies can always do more. Ensuring that a workforce is motivated, feels valued and given the chance to develop are all key to retaining the best talent and growing a successful business.

To empower your workforce, consider creating a culture where employees can help to make organisational decisions and shape the working environment. If supported by regular company-wide forums and appropriate levels of autonomy, empowered people can take any business to new heights.