Page 97 - Retaining Top Employees

McKeown05.qxd 4/13/02 9:28 PM Page 85

Compensation: Why It (Almost) Doesn’t Matter 85

This Isn’t Just for Sales
Motivational compensation elements are usually easiest to
construct for salespeople: they usually have clear targets and
the motivational rewards are based on attaining those goals. Smart
managers establish motivational elements for all their top employees.
It may seem harder to establish motivational rewards for the head of
the audit team in the accounts department,for example,but with the
tools presented later in this chapter you should be able to construct a
set of motivational rewards to match his position.
And if you’re unsure about what motivational elements to include
in designing a compensation package,you have the perfect focus
group—your employees.

their success to be the result of their own efforts alone.
One result of this is an adverse effect on retention. Top
employees can suffer (at their own hands) from a lack of assim-
ilation into the wider group. This is one reason why the maver-
ick overachiever often moves from job to job.
Your compensation package for top performers should
include team-based rewards that reflect the achievement of the
group and encourage the employees to interact with others to
achieve mutually desirable goals. Although this won’t solve the
“assimilation problem” for everyone (inveterate mavericks will
just ignore this aspect of their compensation altogether and
focus on the individual rewards), it will push the borderline
cases into more effective teamwork and, hence, a longer stay.
Compensation as a Form of Accountability
Some top employees are not very teachable. It’s perhaps
understandable that employees who’ve achieved the status of
top performers will feel that there’s little they can be taught
about how to do their job. While this may be true with regard to
their core skills (and even there it’s unlikely that they cannot
learn more), this attitude can be dangerous when it comes to
understanding the organization’s wider goals and being
accountable for working toward them.
Top employees have a tendency often to focus on their own
“turf” to the exclusion of everything else and to wave off attempts