Top Performers: How to Attract and Retain The Best Employees

One of the major challenges that all businesses of any significant size have is finding strong, vital, ambitious employees who are focused on growing the company and its profits. As the saying goes, “Good people are hard to find.”  So how do we attract and retain the top performers we want for our team? The recommendations below will give you a strong start. But the true key is to make attracting and retaining good employees a top priority and focus in all that you do.

Human Resource Department:  The Human Resource Department can make or break a company, yet strangely it is largely ignored by most CEOs. This is a huge mistake. What do you call a company with no employees? That’s right, an empty building! Without employees, you have nothing of value. The major value held by company is its employees. They are the ones who will build, or bury, your company. Make sure the head of your HR Department is one your top performers, and the same goes for their staff. Review with them their hiring practices and evaluate some of their hires that are now at their six month, one year and two years of employment  mark. How are these people performing?

Perform Strategic Firing: I once interviewed the CEO of a large company who said it is his policy to do “Strategic Firing” every 1-3 years to “clean out the dead-wood and negative people.” This CEO stated that any business which doesn’t do this is doomed to fail or will severely underperform. His system was to let go of the lowest performing 5% of his staff and replace them with winners. He would also evaluate who was negative and hurting team performance. He would let these people go no matter where they fell on the scale of personal performance or their level in the hierarchy of the company.

Get Rid of Negative People: The CEO I interviewed was right, negative people can severely damage a company. I highly recommend that you assess your team and get rid of any negative people in your company, no matter who they are. Statistics show that a negative person decreases the effectiveness of everyone around them by 10-25%. This means that if you have a team of 10 people and one person is negative, you are wasting 1-2 1/2 times their salary in lost productivity. Here’s what else happens. The negative person usually stays (they liked the job security and ability to act out negatively here) and your top performer quits (why should they tolerate negativity and politics when any company would be thrilled to have them?)  And what do you think these negative people are doing to your company’s reputation?

Create a Positive Work Environment: Getting rid of the negative employees was a great start. Next, try to remove the competitive environment. We should only compete against other companies, not each other. In-house competitions are insane, we are training our staff to work against each other. How do we win doing that? Instead find ways to reward people for working together and improving productivity as a team. Sanction people for trying to sabotage others or for withholding information/assets that could help the team. Remember that people always like to be appreciated and valued. Look for new ways to do this and make this a priority for your managers and top staff. The more people like the work environment and hold a positive opinion of the company, the more productive they are in the longer they stay. Create a company culture of positive attitudes, appreciation and a inviting family atmosphere. Be sure to thank and recognize people every chance you get and encourage your staff to do the same.

This is just a start, but I think you can easily appreciate just how powerful the strategies are. These ideas can make an amazing difference in performance of your company. You should see significant positive gains right away and in the long-term.

By: Paul Cline  (If you want more FREE resources and articles go to: www.AdvancedTrainingSeminars.com)