The good news according to The Center for Michigan is that “Jobs are plentiful and wages are booming in Michigan”. The 
bad news for employers is they can’t find enough applicants (let alone qualified applicants) to fill their open positions. This condition is true for virtually all employers – manufacturing, health care, retail, transportation, financial, etc. As the job market swings toward increasing scarcity of qualified applicants, a parallel trend begins to appear: top performers in every sector of the economy start to change jobs, looking for better pay, more recognition, opportunity for advancement, or perhaps just a change.
Ask yourself these questions about your people:
- Who is most likely to look for outside opportunities?
- Who finds it easiest to get a different job?
- Who would I miss most, if they quit?
- Whose loss would hurt me most, in our competitive field?
- Who is my competition trying to recruit?
Chances are the answer to all of these questions is exactly the same: “Our best people.”
If your company has been struggling to remain profitable for these past few difficult years, or just struggling to stay alive, you have probably tried to cut costs, delay raises, run lean, and expected more from every worker, especially from your best. They may, by now, feel underpaid and underappreciated, adding to the pressures to look around for a better deal.
Estimates of the cost to replace a top performing employee vary from their annual salary to as much as four times that number. It’s time to reappraise your practices and be sure you are doing everything you can to keep your best employees. There’s almost no other place in your business with the opportunity to reap as much return on your investment!
What can you do to retain your best people?
Identify them: Too many businesses do not really know who their best people are. Use quantifiable, measurable, and objective criteria to identify your top performers. The old saw about not being able to manage what you don’t measure applies here.
Learn what makes them “the best”: Characteristics of top performers can be measured and recorded. If you know those characteristics, you can look for new people to become your best, you can focus on keeping your best, and you can bank the information to help guide your future selection and development actions.
Recognize and reward their performance: While money can be important, in most studies it comes in fourth or fifth in importance when compared to recognition, simple thanks, job satisfaction, opportunity to advance, and other “soft” variables.
Give them a path to follow for promotion: If you know the characteristics of your best people and the characteristics required to succeed in the positions in your business, you can design individual career paths to keep your best people with you, all the while improving your profitability.
Avoid the “Peter Principle”: Few mistakes in business are as costly as over promotion. How many times have we promoted our best engineer, our best sales person, our best “whatever” and lost on both counts. Too often our former top performer (promoted to the point of failure) cannot succeed at the new job and cannot go back to their old job and we then lose them to our competition where they become a top performer again doing their old job!
It takes thought, planning, measurement and investment to keep your best, but it pays!