Hang On To the Top Talent in Your Business

One of the biggest personnel challenges faced by all companies is not just recruiting the top talent but keeping those talented people once they decide to join the company. Many businesses create programs designed to nurture these high fliers and teach them the advanced skills they need in order to climb the ladder and succeed. Unfortunately, for many companies these programs are simply not successful, leaving businesses to continually scramble for more top talent.

There are many ways companies can cultivate their best people into becoming some of the top performers in their field. Here are a few starting points.

1. Competitive Pay

While this may seem an obviously stupid play, many companies often try to under pay their employees in an effort to save money. However, paying an employee what they are worth and offering performance based wage increases on a regular basis is a great way to encourage your employees to excel and dedicate themselves to the company.

2. Offer Incentives

In addition to a competitive salary, you should offer other benefits to your top people, such as flexible work hours, family leave, telecommuting options and, of course, savings and retirement plans. These types of benefits will relieve much stress from these key employees so that they can focus on the work of your business and will help create a sense of caring for the company.

3. Training

Your most talented people will want to improve themselves. To facilitate that, your business should offer training programs and continuing education assistance so your workers can further educate themselves to improve their skills and their value to your company.

4. Feedback and Praise

While it might be easy to forget, it is important to offer regular feedback and praise to your employees for a job well done. A little praise goes far, and a simple compliment will go a long way to fostering a long term relationship with your employees that will benefit both your employee and your business year and year.

5. Provide a Clear Career Path

Your top talent will not only want to know what they will be doing today, but also what they will doing two or three years from now. Providing a clear path of advancement and success will give your best and most valuable employees goals to work towards and something to achieve.

Providing your finest employees with great pay, benefits and methods to continually improve themselves will go a long way in helping your business keep the skills and brains you have found. However, even if you provide everything an employee could ever ask for, you will still lose some of your best talent. This is a reality that must be faced by every company and is simply part of life as a business owner.

You will find, though, that more and more of your talent will stay if you provide them with some of the greatest benefits, pay and a great working environment. This will limit your need for searching for new highly skilled folks to replace people you lose, so you can focus more of your efforts on growing your business to give your existing employees even more room to grow.