Do You Help Craft “Dream Careers” for Your Team? How to Engage and Retain Top Performers

Struggling to keep your best employees motivated to work hard for you?

You’re in good company.

Our current protracted period of extremely low unemployment has put talented employees in the driver’s seat. They’re more demanding, disloyal and discontent than they’ve been in decades. This shift in their mindset makes it incredibly challenging for managers to control turnover and maximize employee performance.

During a true talent war, how can you engage and retain your best performers?

Bruce Tulgan at RainMakerThinking has been tracking the talent war for decades, analyzing myriad data points from business leaders, managers and employees to answer this critical question. According to Tulgan, overcoming recruiting and retention challenges starts with building a winning culture – one in which managers attract superstar employees by offering dream jobs that inspire them to stay and perform.

How can you design dream careers for top talent?

Below are four of the top eight factors people look for when choosing a new job (or choosing to stay in their current one) from Tulgan’s whitepaper, “Winning the Talent War: Building a Winning Culture of Attraction, High-Performance & Retention.”

• Performance-based compensation.
  Your best employees understand their worth and know that performance-based incentives pay off for them, so baseline pay and benefits must be comparable to your competition. In addition to these basics, make sure you offer clearly defined opportunities for high performers to earn more for the exceptional effort they put in and results they deliver.
• Supportive leadership.
  Talented, hard-working people want an immediate manager or supervisor who provides regular support and guidance – without micromanaging. Give employees the training, resources and direction they need to do their jobs well, and then empower them to perform daily tasks as they see fit.
• Roles and responsibilities.
  High performers are passionate about their work. They want well-defined roles, as well as challenging opportunities to grow their skills, prove their worth and achieve their career goals. Beyond a standard job description, a dream career should include a personalized, long-term plan for growth.
• Location and workspace.
  More than just the ability to work near where one lives, this could also include factors like: flexibility to shift start/stop times to avoid rush hour; a comfortable, inviting, well-lit workspace; and/or the ability to have control over that space.

Win the talent war by intentionally building an amazing culture.

Designing dream careers is only step one in building a winning culture; in his whitepaper Tulgan shares four more you can begin implementing today. For more insights and practical tips, read his report.

Partner with PrideStaff to make recruiting more effective.

In today’s employment market, hiring and retaining one amazing employee is better than hiring three or four mediocre ones. To recruit the best candidates, partner with a national staffing firm like PrideStaff that uses the right mix of sourcing tools to deliver the high performers you need. Contact us today to learn more about our On Target fulfillment process.