Stop Top Talent from Walking Out the Door

By Rhonda Campbell

Your Most Talented Employees Might Be Headed for the Door

Don’t look now, but your most talented employees might be headed for the door. Even in a technological age where computer systems are doing work humans once were employed to perform, top talent walking out the door is not a good thing.

Turnover impacts employee morale and productivity. It also impacts your creative business’ bottom line. Depending on the talent level departing employees’ posses, it could cost your creative business from $1,000 to more than $40,000 to replace one of the workers. Expenses that drive up the costs of replacing an employee include:

• Recruiting administrative costs
• Recruiting ads or fees to place job openings on job boards
• Senior level recruiting agency fees (for senior management level jobs)
• Overtime pay for workers who stay late to complete additional assignments until a new employee is hired
• Administrative costs to on-board new employees (e.g. background investigations, drug tests, new hire orientation)
• Training expenses (e.g. Time and costs to train new hires on department processes)

Top Talent Exiting Could Cost You Valuable Clients

Lose a sales representative and it could also cost you valuable clients. It’s a reason many companies create innovative benefits and rewards for their top sales managers, financial advisors and other employees who successfully face off to external clients. They know this top talent walking out the door just might take millions of dollars in client assets from the firm, perhaps to a competitor.

In fact, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) reports that a Right Management survey found as much as 56 percent of the creative business leaders responding to the survey felt, “Other companies actively try to recruit our leaders.” Only 27 percent of the respondents felt their company had sufficiently trained talent to replace top performers should they choose to vacate the firm.

Prevent Top Talent From Walking Out the Door

Steps you can take to prevent top talent from walking out the door (and to position your creative business to remain strong if one or more of your talented performers do exit) include:

• Offer employees opportunities to advance within the firm
• Create benefits and rewards packages to acknowledge employees who exceed expectations
• Conduct employee surveys asking workers questions like what brings them career fulfillment, satisfaction with their salary, satisfaction with relationships with their colleagues and supervisors
• Encourage supervisors and managers to hold regular meetings with employees (e.g. staff meetings, one-on-one meetings)
• Post company employee policies and procedures on a centralized Human Resource website so data is viewable by all employees
• Conduct salary analysis, benchmarking pay against other workers in the industry, to ensure you’re paying employees equitably
• Meet with top performing employees after they indicate that they’re planning on exiting to see if steps can be taken to prevent the department
• Provide opportunities for employees to attend on-site as well as external training programs
• Create incentive programs for top performing long-term employees (e.g. awards luncheons with senior management)
• If your creative business is international, offer top performers the chance to relocate to other parts of the country or world
• Conduct exit interviews with departing employees to and surface key reasons workers are vacating. Work with your human resource team to respond to data surfaced during exit interviews to prevent further departures

There may be times when, despite your best efforts, your top performing employees decide to end their working relationship with you. Personal, family and financial wants drive some workers’ decisions to vacate one company in favor of another. However, if, as a creative business leader, you focus on, and take action steps, to build and strengthen relationships you have with your workers you can retain top performers during economic downturns, peak business seasons and other business periods that lend themselves to increased employee change.

Get into Spiral online at:  https://www.ebookit.com/books/0000000841/Spiral.html

Check out Long Walk Up online at:  https://www.ebookit.com/books/0000000531/Long-Walk-Up.html

Sources:

http://www.shrm.org/HRCareers/Pages/0911poaching.aspx (Society for Human Resource Management: Poaching or Paranoia)

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.htm (United States Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics: Job Openings and Labor Turnover Surveys News Release)