Page 53 - Retaining Top Employees

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Envisioning Your Retention Strategy 41

group, you don’t want to disturb anything with an
unnecessary “retention strategy.” If you misjudge the cli-
mate within your organization or a particular unit and
put strategies in place where retention is not a problem,
you’ll confuse your employees and they’ll believe that
management is out of touch and insincere.
• Resources go only so far. For most managers, targeting
resources on a narrowly defined, key group that will
benefit most from them is much wiser stewardship than
spraying resources across all their employees and hop-
ing some of it sticks. Your want to focus resources where
you can get “the most bang for your buck.”
• It’s easier. As we’ve seen, there are a lot of variables at
play in retention. Truly understanding what’s going on
with any one group of employees and coming up with
the best response can be complicated and time-con-
suming. Anything you can do to simplify the situation,
like dealing with one key group at a time, is going to
improve the quality of your decision-making.

Identifying Key Retention Groups
So, which employees do you target first when you set retention
goals? Sometimes the answer to this question is obvious; some-
times it’s less so.

Managing Mavericks
It’s not uncommon for an organization to find that some of
its top performers are not top team players or that they’re
so lacking in some other business (or social) skills that their status as
top performers is the only thing keeping them in the organization.
It’s very unwise to develop a retention strategy to specifically target
such individuals,for two reasons:
• By implication,it encourages wrong behavior.
• It seriously undermines the motivation of their fellow employees,
who wonder why the organization is trying so hard to retain people
so difficult to work with.
If you’re in this position,consider using a mentoring or coaching
program first,to deal with the employees’ underlying skills deficit,
before involving the employees in a retention program.