Studies show that the least engaged employees in your company are typically the ones that start to head for the door. Improving engagement should be a top priority for organizations that want to slow staff turnover.
Every company has employees that rank on a scale, and every organization wants to retain its top talent. When key players in your company decide to leave, it has the potential to cause a ripple effect through the entire organization if you don’t handle their exit correctly.
Highly-skilled and talented employees that don’t show high levels of engagement are among those with the highest turnover in companies – on par with lower-level, unhappy, and disengaged employees.
Therefore, we can see clear evidence that when your top employees aren’t engaged, they’re as likely to walk out of the door for greener pastures as low-level employees with less value to the company.
Why Does Top Talent Leave So Fast?
Top employees are hard to find. In the current skills shortage facing corporations around the world, the hunt for talent is on. Top employees have a choice of where they want to work. If organizations can’t provide them with the employee experience they deserve, they’ll look to your competitors.
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to tell the engagement level of your employees based on performance alone. Engagement might elevate performance, but top employees are already top performers. Therefore, your best talent might still over-achieve, even if they’re feeling miserable at work.
Most managers make the catastrophic error of leaving top performers alone, thinking that they don’t have to worry about their experience. As a result, managers end up spending more time trying to motivate the lower-level underachievers, while their top talent rots away unnoticed.
The winning equation for ensuring long-term high performance in your top employees is the following.
Talent x Engagement x Talent x Experience = Highest Performance
Finding true talent is rare for any organization. When they decide to come to work for the company, managers need to ensure they do everything they can to provide a positive employee experience.
Talented employees are also expensive to replace. Some organizations invest heavily in their people, which is one of the cornerstones of the employee experience.
However, if the company is lacking in other areas, the employee will take that training and leave you for your competitor. All your investment goes down the drain as your employee walks out of the door.
Ultimately, organizational managers have only one job – to hire top talent and maintain continuous engagement with them. Most managers realize who the talented people are on their team. However, managers need to ensure they establish regular feedback loops to ensure the best employees remain engaged.
Managers that don’t cater to the basic psychological requirements of top employees end up squandering years of potential performance gains.
Analytics-based hiring and engagement tools assist organizations with identifying top talent and offer useful conversation-starters between management and elite-level employees.
Failing to Engage Top Talent is a Severe Risk for Every Organization
While this is a true statement, it’s also possible to remedy the situation through the use of managers trained to understand the needs of top team members.
