Page 104 - Retaining Top Employees

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92 Retaining Top Employees

important to be clear about that role.
Deferred compensation does not of itself promote employee
retention by simply forcing the employee to wait around until
the deferred compensation is paid or the stock options vest. It
will positively impact retention if you use it to meet any or all of
our retention-related compensation goals:
1. Recognition
2. Motivation
3. Team building
4. Accountability
5. Trust-building
Design your deferred compensation to serve as a form of
recognition, certainly (by publicly announcing the award, for
example), and to motivate employees to want to earn their stock
options. Build in team-building or accountability requirements for
employees to qualify for deferred compensation. Build trust by
consistently making payments. But don’t just award a deferred
compensation package with a date three years in the future and
assume that you’ve successfully “locked in” your top employees.
Benefits
Benefits are recurring non-cash rewards that are deemed to be
part of base pay. A health plan, dental payments, vacation,
pension, life insurance coverage, a car—all of these are bene-
fits. In fact, the list is limited only by the imagination of the
employee or the employer!
For most jobs there’s a mix of benefits that the

Influence Equals Impact
As a general rule,the more an individual can influence the
value of his or her deferred compensation,the more effect it
has as a motivator.A CEO,who can directly affect the company’s share
price by her acts,is more likely to be motivated by stock options than
an employee some distance away from strategic decision-making. In fact,
if you award stock options to an employee who has absolutely no sense
of being able to influence the stock value,you can engender a feeling of
helplessness and accelerate the “martyr syndrome” described earlier.