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In a booming market for job seekers, how can we retain our superstar employees? It’s an old question, and here are some tips and proven secrets I’ve learned from great leaders. After investing time and effort in training employees and watching them develop into top talent, how do we ensure that we get a return on that investment? It’s a painful loss when employees take their developed skills to the competition or elsewhere in general. Retaining the best employees goes far beyond compensation.

Through years of experience as an HR leader and leadership trainer and facilitator, I’ve come to value specific retention and engagement tools, and I’m happy to share my top 10 with you. Part of leadership includes making other people stronger and better. I have been fortunate to learn from mentors who have generously shared their best practices. In my experience, the best leaders tend to be the most generous in sharing their knowledge.

1. Show genuine care and concern: We spend so many hours at work alongside our employees that managers and leaders who have the ability to connect with their teams are more likely to win hearts and minds.
2. Recognize Contributions and Good Work: Everyone likes to be appreciated and recognized when their work deserves positive feedback. Ask your employees if they prefer to be recognized when they come on board. In this way, you can personalize the thank you tokens. The very fact that you have taken the time to understand their individual preferences shows that you care.
3. Create and promote development plans: Help your team set broad and individual goals to discover areas where they can improve. This can be done through daily feedback, performance reviews, and/or leadership reviews. Set broad and specific goals. As a leader, you have the ability to impact your team members for the better. Take advantage of opportunities to empower employees to be thoughtful and find their own solutions without micromanaging.
4. Develop People Skills and Emotional Intelligence: It is important to develop your own interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence. Ask people you trust for feedback and challenge yourself to be a reflection of the areas where you are strong and the areas where you need to develop. There are many books on Emotional Intelligence. I am a fan of the book Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves. It comes with an assessment so you can assess areas of your own development. After reading the book, you get a second chance at the assessment to see how you’ve improved. If you have strong people skills, you are more likely to engage and connect with your team members.
5. Use delegation to challenge and stretch: Delegation is a management tool that can be used to create efficiencies, and it is also a leadership tool that can help you develop your team members. Select assignments based on the experience level of the team member who will carry out the task, and give more autonomy to the most knowledgeable employees and to employees with the necessary experience.
6. frequent registrations: The current trend is to replace problematic one-off annual check-ups with frequent check-ups. I agree that it is important to check in regularly with your team members. Please note that I use the term “Check-In”. This is different from “Check the”. Check-ins are beneficial if implemented as opportunities to give and receive quality feedback.
7. Celebrate life’s events: Celebrating individual team members’ life events, such as marriage, having a child, work anniversaries, and birthdays, shows your team that you care about them as people, and not just about what they can do for themselves. you. While I’m all for limits, I think showing your human side is a plus, and if you experiment with that, you’re likely to get some great feedback.
8. To promote teamwork: Coming to work is a pleasure when you are part of a highly functional team. My favorite book on teamwork is a book called “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” by Patrick Lencioni. In his fable about a dysfunctional team, the author reviews the importance of trust, productive conflict, commitment to the team and goals, the presence of accountability, and ultimately, a team that strives for results. .
9. Connect employees to the big picture: To achieve optimal engagement, employees must know how their work impacts company goals. Every job is important, and employees need to be aware of how their contributions advance company results.
10. Make performance pay meaningful: I saved compensation for last, as compensation has been shown to have little impact on employee motivation and performance. That said, if compensation is perceived to be unfair, it will likely serve to demotivate and disengage employees. High achievers want to know that they are being rewarded for superior contributions.