Means to retain good employees

Introduction: Company executives are now beginning to realize the high value of innovative employees, whose value is 5 to 300 times that of ordinary employees. If there are not enough innovative people within the company, one of the main methods is to recruit people. Yes, you can successfully recruit innovative people, but the problem is how to consistently retain these people who have been "missed" by recruiting departments at other companies. If your company poached this talent from their current employer, there's a good chance another company will poach them as well.

Unfortunately, 95% of all retention measures have at most a small impact on the average employee and are thus useless at retaining innovative people because their needs and expectations are different from those of the average employee. Therefore, if companies want to retain their best innovators, they should develop a set of bold, radical, data-based retention measures based on their specific situations and provide them to managers at all levels.

1. Retain innovative employees based on data

If you use conventional retention measures for innovative employees, don’t expect success. So, if you are planning to develop a retention program or tool for innovators, make sure it:

Use a data-based approach. 95 of the retention measures that instructor Peng Xiaodong has reviewed are all based on emotions and assumptions. Since innovators are of high value, you cannot afford to fail to retain them; therefore, a smart retention strategy is to use data and marketing research techniques to find out what measures work for innovators and why. They are particularly effective.

Priority is given to innovative personnel. Innovators can have a huge impact on your business; therefore, it’s important to retain every one of them. Either prioritize your innovators or create separate retention programs for your other employees.

Understand the different factors that motivate innovators. The findings from surveys that look at "all employees" don't apply to innovators. Reasons like "the best job of your life," "the freedom to innovate," and "truly changing the world" are not motivating to lower-performing groups of employees in your organization.

It varies from person to person. Implementing uniform retention measures within a company won't do much because the reasons why employees leave vary. Therefore, if you want to retain innovative employees, you need to develop a personalized retention plan that varies from person to person.

Identify the innovators who are most likely to leave. Even though you’ve prioritized innovators, your retention efforts should also identify and focus on those who are most likely to leave.

Develop a variety of retention plans. Innovators’ immediate supervisors know best the retention goals and are most in trouble once an innovator leaves. Therefore, managers of innovators should be responsible for this retention process. Instead, avoid putting HR in charge of retention programs and instead let them develop retention tools and let managers choose the tools or "levers" that will have the greatest impact on their teams.

2. Use influence to retain innovative employees

The key to successfully retaining talents is to let managers master the tools or levers that experience has proven to be effective for innovative employees. . Here are some retention tools that have been proven effective for innovators.

1. Retention plan? Tailor-made. Each innovator's situation is different from others; therefore, their managers should work with HR retention experts to put together a personalized retention plan for each innovator. The program should begin by identifying potential factors that may cause innovators to consider leaving. Managers should then develop appropriate tools or "retention levers" that can best help solve such problems. HR should distribute plan templates and examples to managers to make their jobs easier.

2. Make sure they are doing the best job of their lives.

Generally speaking, what motivates innovative people the most is having the best job of their life. Ideally, managers would ensure that they talk to the people they want to retain once a year to figure out what the innovators' areas of interest, dream assignments, and projects would look like. Additionally, quarterly follow-up conversations are needed to ensure that innovators are continuing to do the work they believe is their best work.

3. Develop the best management file for me. Even outstanding managers need to understand the most effective or optimized methods to communicate, motivate, empower, make decisions, motivate, reward and give feedback to innovative people. The most effective approach is to work with the innovation staff to build a profile that covers the ways in which this workforce can be most effectively managed. It is best to create this file at the beginning of the above-mentioned work, but it should be updated at least every two years.

Another approach is to ask innovators to pretend they are their new boss and ask themselves: How would you change your current job, and how would you manage to do it perfectly? Sometimes, The best way to manage innovative people is to treat them as "volunteers" and direct them using influence rather than orders. Clearly, the success of these individuals in retaining them and their satisfaction with how they are managed above them should be key indicators and reward factors in the organization's evaluation of the performance of the manager of this innovator and the manager's supervisor.

4. Draw up a list of positive and negative factors that stimulate employees. In addition to having competent managers, being optimally managed, and having the best job of your life, there are other job factors that can excite or frustrate innovators. Interviews or surveys should be used at least once a year to identify the positive factors that employees would like to strengthen. Typical factors that innovators often want to enhance include better work equipment, more support and assistance, opportunities to collaborate with other innovators, and better communication with senior management.

In addition, you should identify and try to minimize any negative aspects of the work that make innovators feel bored, frustrated, nervous, or otherwise perceived as a waste of time. Typical negatives include meetings, paperwork, constant travel, annoying team members, and administrative work. You should also develop a set of metrics, benchmarks, and memos to ensure that innovators are motivated by positive factors and not hindered by negative factors. You can regularly identify what they see as barriers to innovation or productivity and work together to remove those barriers, allowing the positive factors to continue to influence them and increase their productivity. You also want to ask them what part of their job they enjoy most. Make sure they spend most of their time doing the tasks they enjoy and are best at.

5. Conduct interviews with them and ask them, "Why will you stay/will you leave?" Instead of waiting for innovators to consider external job offers, proactively ask them during interviews or surveys, "Why will you stay?" On the contrary, you can gain something. You should also find out during this retention interview that the answer to the question "Why did you leave?" includes the specific factors that demotivate innovators as well as the positive factors that would entice them to leave for other companies.

By figuring out why innovators stay in their jobs and companies, you can reinforce the positives and eliminate the most negative ones. The first "retention interview" should be conducted when the innovator first assumes a position, and interviews should be conducted every two years thereafter.

6. Maximize their opportunities to innovate and enjoy the freedom to innovate. If opportunities to innovate and take risks are reduced, innovators will feel demotivated. This means you have to continually offer them opportunities. You can also expand their creative freedom by giving them one free day a week (e.g., 20 hours) or one day a month to work on their favorite projects.

Innovators love to take risks. So they often also want permission to take greater risks and pursue less-than-perfect projects.

In addition, innovators desire greater control over the projects assigned to them, including when, how and where they work. In most cases, they want to work with the best colleagues and not even a passive one, so you might as well build a team according to their suggestions. Innovators often don't play by the rules, so you should do everything you can to reduce restrictions, controls, or barriers that might discourage innovators.

7. Ask newly recruited innovators: ?What can motivate you? If you want innovators to become a strong player immediately, then do it during the onboarding orientation for them. A survey: What specific things do you think can improve your motivation? At the same time, you can also ask: What kind of challenges do you want to accept? What are your learning/growth goals? What are your promotion goals? Where do you hope to be in two years' time? What would demotivate you? What were the reasons for your first two departures?

Managers should develop plans to ensure that innovators achieve their challenges and learnings Or the goal of organizational promotion, try to avoid dampening their enthusiasm.

8. Ask them to stay on regularly. The most cost-effective and powerful tool for retaining innovators is to regularly remind them of their important role in the organization and then say directly to them: Please stay. ?For those innovators who enjoy the feeling of being needed, this method is simple but extremely effective.

As a supplement, you can explain to them that they have no right to remain silent when their motivation is thwarted. Managers of innovators should at least try to get them to agree to alert their superiors before considering leaving, giving management enough time to at least try to resolve the problem.

9. Show them the impact of their work. For most innovators, there are two main factors that motivate them, one is to have the best career of their life, and the other is to see the impact of their work on the field and the world at large. The latter means you should switch gears and show every innovator the impact of their work. You can just show them the impact their work has on downstream processes and its importance to the company, their profession and the world at large, or you can let them interact with your suppliers and customers. You can help them realize the importance of their work in their field by having them publish articles and give presentations at professional conferences.

10. Extend the induction time for new employees and customize the content. Newly hired innovators are different from ordinary employees. Therefore, they need managers to tailor subsequent onboarding processes that are more suitable for the unique needs of innovators. Sadly, more than 50% of new hires regret accepting their position, and most decide within the first two months whether they want to stay, according to research by Recruiting Rou Ndt able. Therefore, as you go about your work, you should assume that the recruiting executive may be unintentionally over-promising or over-embellishing the company to win over this highly valued talent.

To avoid misunderstandings or boasting, it is often wise for managers to extend the induction period for newly hired or newly transferred innovators to up to three months. Managers can use the extra time to identify problems and fix anything that might make the new innovator regret joining the company.

3. Use incentives to retain innovative employees

If your organization is really motivated and you don’t want to lose any innovative employees, then instructor Peng Xiaodong can provide some extremely radical ideas. Alternative means for you to try.

11. Provide a coveted job responsibilities letter. Consider offering them a "coveted job description" that gives them scope to redesign their current role or their next role within the company.

12. Provide team retention rewards.

Team retention bonus refers to a generous bonus given to everyone on the team if no one leaves when the project is successfully completed. Alternatively, you could offer them a "successful completion bonus" or a written long-term contract requiring them to continue working for the company until the project is successfully completed.

13. Strengthen relationships with colleagues. Nurture and strengthen relationships with their colleagues and build a support system around family members. These two approaches work together to encourage innovators to stay with the company, or to give you a heads-up when you discover that innovators are planning to leave. In addition, you can educate other members of the innovator team that they can play an important role in helping to retain key employees and help identify when and why innovators are interested in leaving.

14. Provide opportunities for leadership and increased income. Many innovators don’t want to be leaders, but if they do want to try, they should be given the opportunity to choose to be leaders, and be sure to strengthen leadership training: many people want to take management positions just to increase their income, so make sure to provide backup means (For example, assigning them as researchers or chief scientists) so that they can increase their income without being burdened with management responsibilities.

15. To provide opportunities and create conditions for its development and future. For example, if you are a marketing staff, the most important thing to retain is two words: "Customer". As long as you retain customers, you will retain talents, and you will retain products. If you retain talents, if you retain projects, you will also retain talents!