Page 114 - Retaining Top Employees

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102 Retaining Top Employees

Once you’ve identified
Risk Analysis
the top employees to
A risk analysis would
involve assessing each top include in your recognition
employee (on a scale of 1 to 5,for program, you need to con-
example) on criteria such as their sider the design. There are
current and recent performance, three options:
skills,and ease of replacement.The
result would be a ranking of employ- • Separate
ees in the order in which you should • Tiered
include them in a recognition pro- • Modular
gram at this time.
Separate Program
Should your recognition program be for top performers only,
separate from other employees? In my experience, such an
approach has substantial drawbacks, not least on the morale of
those employees not involved in the recognition program. A
separate, elite recognition program (for top performers only)
can exist harmoniously under two conditions:

• There are clear outputs to be recognized that only top
performers are likely to achieve.
• All other employees are receiving total compensation
packages that are above the industry and job average.
If you’re not meeting both of these conditions, consider a
tiered program or a modular program.

Tiered Program
In most circumstances, recognition programs for top employees
will run together with or as part of wider employee recognition
programs. The most common way to do this is to have a
“tiered” recognition program, where there are escalating
rewards depending on the seniority of the employee and/or the
level of achievement.
This approach works in most cases. But if a desired result of
the recognition program for one particular group is very precise
(such as the retention of top employees), designing a tiered pro-
gram can be somewhat restricting, as the recognition program