A successful business requires more than just having a great product, service, or strategic plan. It requires obtaining and retaining the best individuals who can turn that product idea and plan into reality!
You need an amazing team alongside you with the skills and foresight to propel your company into the future. But naturally, you know that every other organization in our economy is also striving for the same thing. With that being said, how do you make sure that your valued employees stay by your side?
Believe it or not, the answer is not always money!
First, realize that hiring the best and retaining the best are two completely different concepts. Hiring qualified employees is very much a surface-level endeavor. You are vetting candidates to determine if their qualifications are a right fit for your business and the various tasks needing completion while they are vetting you to see if your company is a right fit for them.
Though after they are hired, this is when the real challenge begins. It is your turn to uphold your end of the agreement, showing them why they should stay and contribute their highly valued skills to your organization.
In my decades of advising organizations on building the ideal team to reach and sustain significance in their industries, I have found that obtaining qualified candidates is not the difficult part. The difficult part is getting those employees to stay. I have also found that the key to retaining top talent is to foster an Anticipatory culture, one that will take on the challenges that arise as well as what the future will hold. You need to have a strategy that aligns employee Futureview® with that of the organization.
How organizations do it wrong
As mentioned above, money and benefits are important, but they are not everything.
I realize this may seem unusual, especially as the economy fluctuates and cost of living goes up. Regardless, this statement is true.
Yes, promotions and rewards make employees feel valued and confident that they can rely on your organization for financial stability. But are you rewarding the right behaviors? Are you rewarding true knowledge creation and wisdom or are you promoting knowledge silos, where employees hoard wisdom to reinforce their employability elsewhere?
Many organizations often fall into the trap of focusing on short-term achievements and individual accolades rather than fostering a long-term collaborative and innovative culture.
In this type of climate, employees become more focused on personal gains rather than the overall success of their team. As information silos, you will find that when they do not achieve those individual, short-term gains, they leave as quickly as possible.
Generally, this knowledge hoarding is due to a lack of trust with your organization and its culture. An uncertain future and uncertain leadership promote the idea that employees should only look out for themselves instead of viewing themselves as part of the bigger picture of the organization. This can be because they do not trust that the doors will still be open tomorrow due to the fact that the organization seems to have no unified direction, nor does it value their input.
How do you as a hiring manager or business leader ensure your top talent keeps their contributions at your organization?
3. Foster an aligned Futureview®
Futureview® is a term I coined over 30 years ago in reference to the vivid mental picture we each hold of our future existence. It is not the same as a goal, plan, or ambition. It is not what we hope to achieve but what we actually see when we think of our future, for better or for worse.
Everyone has a Futureview®, whether we realize it or not, but it is becoming aware of our Futureview® that puts a tremendous tool in our strategic arsenal. It dictates the actions we will take as well as the actions we forgo, allowing us to take control of our future and determine our own realities.
As a business leader, it is your job to first realize your own Futureview® and then to foster an organization-wide Futureview® that is united. Whether because of lack of trust or lack of pay aside, high-value employees leave because their Futureview® does not include your organization. On the positive side, they will stay because it does!
The first step in retaining those employees is to realize what your Futureview® is for your organization. If you do not have a vivid picture of where the organization will be in the future, then how will employees know their role in that future? How will employees trust they will have a job in a year, a month, a week, or even tomorrow?
The second step here is to align your employee’s Futureview® with yours. You need to ensure that they see the same future that you do but that they also see their place in that future, being an integral part of it.
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2. Give Employees Purpose
Compensation is a large part of the hiring process. But money comes and goes. Instead, a bigger purpose in life is insurmountable.
Employees need to feel that their work contributes value to the organization. They need to know that they are working for a reason, contributing to the overall benefit of the organization and that those contributions mean something.
Here are some steps in helping give your employees a more profound sense of purpose:
- The organization’s vision, message, and goals are often abstract concepts to employees, something they look at once during the hiring process. Be sure to regularly and clearly communicate how their individual skills are contributing to the overall success of the organization.
- Each employee delivers results, regardless of their job, so be sure to share those results with them and how their job impacted overall performance.
- Encourage employees to think in an Anticipatory fashion. Encourage employees to look at both Hard Trends and Soft Trends to foresee future disruptions and utilize their own skill sets to transform them into opportunities.
- This both creates a common language between employees – building a common community – and encourages them to play a vital role in the company’s future.
1. Reward the Correct Behaviors
Many organizations reward counterproductive behaviors. They reward knowledge silos and an every-person-for-themselves mentality, often without knowing it. This leads to high employee turnover rates as a result of pursuing personal accolades instead of organizational contributions.
To keep high-value employees at your organization, the key is to reward behaviors that contribute to the overall good of the organization. You must teach employees that their contributions are helping build an irreplicable shared knowledge base between departments – that their skills are valued throughout the organization and that their specific knowledge matters.
Consider these steps in that process:
- Encourage employees to share their expertise across departments. Knowledge does not benefit just one department!
- Rewards do not just include compensation. They also include recognition, feedback, and collaboration.
Recognizing the individual achievements of high-value employees while exhibiting to them how their contributions affect the health of the organization they are part of is easier than most realize.
In many cases, all it takes is both communication and collaboration with your staff to make sure their Futureview® aligns with yours. Be sure to encourage an Anticipatory mindset as well to build a productive and successful future in the most effective way!
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