Page 75 - Retaining Top Employees

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Know Your Demographics 63

Growth Opportunities
Dust off Those Job
Employees become top Specifications
performers by constantly Providing top employees
striving to grow, both per- with challenging and fulfilling assign-
sonally and in their ments starts with the job specifica-
careers. Career and per- tion. If the description is limited in
scope and lacks vision,the chances
sonal growth opportunities
are that the assignments flowing from
are therefore essential for
it are equally uninspiring.
retaining top performers. Review the job specifications for
Although (as we’ll see) your retention target group(s). Do
Boomers and Gen-Xers they make you excited? Would you
differ as to which growth apply for these jobs? If not,get the
opportunities they most appropriate people together and dis-
respond to, of the seven cuss how you can improve the job
specifications to make them catalysts
retention factors this is the
for challenging assignments.
one about which, in gener-
al, the two generations are
most in agreement. All top employees agree: stagnate and
you’re dead. A top performer’s résumé is built by demonstrating
regular, quantum increases in skills and achievements. If your
organization doesn’t provide such opportunities, top employees
will leave.

Compensation and Rewards
Generally speaking, the issue of compensation and other quan-
tifiable rewards is overstated in most employee retention strate-
gies. As we’ll see in Chapter 5, although compensation and
rewards are an important part of recognizing and fulfilling the
needs of employees, their impact is binary:
• Get it wrong (pay people materially lower than the mar-
ket average) and everything else you do will have little
or no impact.
• Get it right (pay people appropriately) and you’re just “in
the game”—you still have to get all the other six elements
right.