Page 98 - Retaining Top Employees

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86 Retaining Top Employees

to get them to see the bigger picture. A world-class research sci-
entist or software programmer, for example, will often plead to be
left alone to do their work and will beg off meetings concerning
anything they view as “unimportant” (usually anything to do with
leadership, finances, setting goals, or planning projects).
This has the same effect on retention as the previous issue
regarding teamwork. By not being connected to the “core” of
the organization—by being only semi-connected, if you will—the
top employee is vulnerable from a retention point of view.
(Usually in this case, the employee awakes as from a dream to
find that the evil employer has completely abandoned the lais-
sez-faire cultural ethos that first prompted the person to join the
organization and is pressing too hard for him to conform to
financial and other areas of accountability. Suddenly, he’s off,
usually leaving bad feelings.)
In this situation, your compensation package must include a
strong level of accountability from the outset. Whether you
attribute an element of payment to submitting regular reports or
attending specific meet-
Use Base ings or helping attain
Compensation, Not wider organizational goals
Incentives (such as building the skills
To effectively promote accountability, of the team), the clearer
this element of a top employee’s you make such goals at
compensation package must be based the outset, the better your
on withholding a part of the base chances of increasing
compensation against compliance
accountability.
with the relevant issues, not on paying
an incentive or giving perks for com- Compensation as a
pliance. Die-hard “non-accountables” Trust-Builder
will just ignore the incentives and
perks and continue to remain semi- One of the most positive
factors in retaining top
detached.
performers is the develop-
ment of trust between the employer and the employee. That
trust is expressed most acutely in the compensation package
and how it’s administered.