5 Actions To Keep High Performing Staff Longer
Every manager wants to keep their high performing staff longer. High performing employees deliver a lot more value for relatively little more in pay. Attract and keep enough high performing staff in your team, manage them well and you are likely to have at least good team performance which is great news for you – the manager leading the team.
As well all know, keeping high performing staff is the challenge. They are the ones that get regular calls from recruiters. The high performers are the ones that find it easiest to get another job and leave.
5 Actions To Keep High Performing Staff Longer
- Think and create partnerships
- Proactively create regular development opportunities
- Provide lots of honest structured feedback
- Minimise distractions and pain points
- Pay them well to make leaving harder
Per Havard Business Review, a high performer can deliver 400% more productivity than an average performer. That is like having 4 people on your team and rather than 1 which is exactly why keeping high performers for longer is a big deal for you.
I have 5 actions or approaches you should take to keep high performing staff longer. How well you put each into practice determines how long you keep high performing employees.
I share a lot of practical tips that I have road tested in many top companies over a 20 year management career. At the end I also share vital tips to keep the rest of your team happy which is necessary for high overall team performance.
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Think and create partnerships – The first approach to keep high performing staff longer
Achieving a great team performance is a lot easier with a couple of high performers in the team. You need them probably more than they need you. After all finding and attracting another high performing employee to join your team is not easy and is costly – in terms of your time as well as the cash cost.
Treating your high performing staff as partners will:
- Make them feel more valued and appreciated
- You will utilise more of their talents
- The right mindset will create more development opportunities for them
- They will get more autonomy and responsibility
Some of the actions you can take to treat them as a partner rather than an employee are:
- Give them goals to reach and problems to overcome and let them work out how to achieve those goals or solve those problems
- Regularly ask for their opinions, their insights and their solutions
- Carefully manage their workload but not their work
- Undertake problem solving with them as an equal
Create a partnership mentality and mindset towards your high performing staff and your actions, how you communicate and treat them will follow.
Think and create partnerships with high performing employees.
Proactively create regular development opportunities – The second action to keep high performing staff longer
High performers need and love the opportunity to learn more and increase their skills. This is a key characteristic that makes them high performers in the first place. Good development opportunities are probably the most attractive “reward” for high performing staff.
Creating regular development opportunities in practice for high performing staff is hard work for managers. It is not nearly as easy as most managers hope. After all your team still needs to deliver the core repetitive work needed to reach team goals.
Some of the best ways to develop your high performing staff are:
- Regularly mentor and coach high performers in one-on-one meetings. Think of all the skills and experience you have. In which of these areas does it make most sense to develop your high performer?
- Ask around the business and look out for projects that your high performers could contribute to. Fight on their behalf for them to join the project teams where it makes business sense.
- Help them build relationships across the wider business – on a personal and professional level. Introduce them. Bring them along to meetings. Invite them to your peer lunches or coffees. Persuade them to attend company social events…
- As regularly as practical, rotate some of their responsibilities and activities. Always have a plan to expand their skills and experience.
- Ask your high performer to teach others. Teaching others is a great way to learn yourself plus it passes on their valuable skills
Constantly and proactively look out for ways to further develop the skills, knowledge and experience of your high performing employees.
Provide lots of honest structured feedback – The third action
We need feedback to improve. The more feedback we get and the better the quality of that feedback, the quicker we can improve.
A lot of high performers have a growth mindset. That is they mentally turn any feedback you give them – positive or corrective – into an opportunity to learn. Don’t be afraid to tell them how they need to improve as well as tell them what they are doing well.
Research has shown that you need to give positive feedback at least three times as much as corrective feedback to keep your employees happy. This is a surprisingly high bar. Think back on your last week – have you managed three times?
Finally, to improve the quality of your feedback, make it very specific. Talk about decisions, actions, behaviours and results not about them as people. Everyone can change the former fairly quickly. Receiving corrective feedback on how you are as a person is not going to make you happy or motivate you.
Give feedback regularly, honestly, directly and with diplomacy and empathy.
minimise their distractions and pain points – The fourth action to keep high performing employees longer
Removing problems that your team is facing is one of best ways to leverage your time as a manager. In the process you make your team a lot more productive, happier, more motivated and you create goodwill and trust towards you.
Per Havard Business Review, a high performer can deliver 400% more productivity than an average performer. Remove the problems of one person and the team performance improves as if you removed the problems of 4 people. A brilliant use of your time.
Make the time to find out what problems your team is facing and in particular your high performer. Ask questions. Dig into the reasons behind problems and work out what you can do to solve those problems.
Common problems
That reduce team and high performer productivity are:
- Difficult, disruptive or poor performing team members. Problem people have a big negative impact on most teams – take action quickly to resolve people problems.
- Unclear goals which usually happen because there are too many competing goals. Make it really clear which goals have priority. Constantly keep repeating your message.
- Organisational conflict. This is where different parts of the business or different teams have conflicting goals or conflicting responsibilities. Sales and finance is a classic. Do your best to minimise the organisational conflict experienced by your team.
- Excessive admin or low value tasks. Invest your time to remove as many low value tasks from the team as possible. This usually requires persuading stakeholders to do something differently. Alternatively invest in automation and software to do as much of the work as possible.
When you start looking, you will find lots of small opportunities and some bigger opportunities. Do everything you can to minimise team distractions and pain points.
pay them well to make leaving harder – The fifth action to keep high performing staff longer
With high performers delivering up to 400% more than the average employees, paying them more than average makes a lot of business sense.
In practice, politics and a sense of fairness are big barriers to being able to pay high performers enough to make it much harder for them to leave. Typically employees get a salary for X hours of work. Most employees don’t see the difference in results that those hours create. Therefore, from a fairness perspective, similar level employees want similar pay regardless of output.
How you pay high performer more matters. Push high performers pay above the average as much as fairness allows and then think about bonuses and other variable pay linked to results. Do not pay everyone the same or your high performers will the be the first to leave.
One other point – be proactive in increasing the pay of your highest performing staff. Increase it before they ask. It is a false economy to save money in this area. Your best staff will leave soonest, reducing your team performance by way more than any money saved.
Getting the balance right
Managing high performers is a careful balancing act. If your actions and approach alienate the rest of your team, team performance overall is likely to drop, which is bad news for you and your team.
Once a teams’ performance starts dropping, people start leaving and performance drops even further even faster.
I suggest that everything you do for and everything you offer to your high performers, you try to do for the rest of your team too. This creates a fair and level playing field. Everyone gets development opportunities and feedback. You help everyone by removing problems and you proactively look at pay versus the market and fight to get your team paid fairly.
Give the best opportunities to your highest performers. Spend more time thinking about and giving better quality feedback to your high performers. Prioritise solving the problems your high performer are struggling with first. As a manager, I think you must give better rewards for better performance. Doing anything else sends the wrong message and team performance will suffer.
Work hard at getting the balance right.
In summary
Your high performing team members deliver a lot more than average staff. Per Havard Business Review up to 4 times more. Getting effectively 4 people instead of 1 is going to really improve the performance potential of any team they are in.
In my experience, managing high performing staff is harder and more work than managing poor performing staff. Putting in that work is a brilliant way to increase your team’s performance and essential for keeping high performing staff longer.
If you have any question on “5 Actions To Keep High Performing Staff Longer” please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
I personally think managing and keeping high performers is a vital part of building high performing teams. One or two high performers can significantly increase team performance so it is in the manager’s interests to do all they can to keep high performing employees as long as possible.
I have found these 5 tactics to be the best to keep high performers motivated, interested and planning to stay put. To build high performing teams, these tactics are a must to use.
Jess