Attracting and Retaining Top Talent: The Key to Corporate Success
by David Bratton
The highest
priority for any company is to remain successful. One critical factor to this success is the ability of an organization to not only attract top talent, but to retain those already working within the company. Losing employees can have a significant impact on your company’s morale, productivity, and overall profit.
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David Bratton
HR consultant
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The formula for attracting and especially retaining top talent lies in creating a high level of job satisfaction, which includes not only work itself but the factors relating to the climate or work environment. One of the most overestimated reasons companies think they attract and retain top talent is through financial compensation. However, this is ranked very low for most in regard to overall job satisfaction.
Whether through expenditures in agency or search firms, lower productivity, or reduced morale, high turnover costs your company. In fact, each time one of your employees walks out your door for the last time, it can cost your company anywhere from $25,000 for a lower level entry position, up to $250,000 for a senior executive position. Losing employees can also drain a company’s overall level of talent expertise as competitors rarely go after the worst employees. It is usually the people you can least afford to lose who leave.
Excellent companies know intuitively the importance of providing challenging work, opportunities to apply skills, and the importance of the organization’s reputation. They work hard to improve the climate of work because they know that this will cause people to gravitate to them and want to work for them based on their reputation in the marketplace as an excellent place to work.
There are a number of things that a company can do to keep good people from leaving:
Show your key employees that you care. Take personal interest in developing your staff. Mentor and coach the high performers.
Maintain your credibility by ensuring that you consistently do what you say you will do.
Measure the “soft” skills as well as the hard skills. In addition to output, profit, and sales, consider how the work gets done, the balanced score card, customer satisfaction, etc.
Fight turnover with good, rational training targeted to specific and individual needs. Beware of off-the-shelf training programs that promise the world and deliver nothing.
Weed out poor managers. Dissatisfied workers dislike poor management. Act quickly to preserve your credibility in the workforce.
Address issues of poor performance. Other workers resent having to carry someone who cannot or will not pull their own weight.
Provide inspirational vision and strong values.
Create meaningful and challenging work and an environment that enables people to do their best work.
Offer career development and promotional opportunities.
Grant tangible rewards in both monetary and non-monetary ways.
Ensure work-life balance and support its importance.
Finally, remember that attracting and keeping the right people happens not as a result of strategy, but implementation. Attracting and keeping the right people translates into real dollars on the bottom line. Pursue your goal of success for your company by creating a great work climate. You’ll be pleasantly surprised how much this approach will pay off for you.
David Bratton is an independent management consultant and president of Bratton Consulting Inc. in London, Ont. He can be reached at dbratton@brattonconsulting.com.
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