4 Ways to Develop and Keep Your Current Employee Talent

As the economy picks up, workers who had the “just glad I have a job” mentality are feeling confident they can now pursue change and better working conditions.

This poses a challenge to the companies and organizations who have already invested thousands of dollars in finding and training them.

Human resources professionals are increasingly taxed with the challenge of finding new ways to develop current employees and provide them with sufficient challenge and rewards so they stay where they are.

More and more companies are coming to the realization that as great as it is to court and welcome new talent, the consistent skills and reliability of current employees must be valued if they are going to stay stable and productive in an expanding growing global marketplace.

The challenge companies are facing emerged in a study by Towers Watson who, after conducting a survey of 1,600 organizations around the world, discovered that companies are increasing their focus on their current employees and investing in them.

Four areas where investments were made in employees, to encourage them to stay with the company and stay engaged with it, included:

1. Giving the employees room to grow and advance – The best and the brightest will not be comfortable working in a dead end position. Effective human resources practices designed to keep great employees included career-planning sessions with employees to help them see the long-term opportunities.
2. Encouraging empowerment and innovation- Creative employees responded well to more autonomy in their workplace, the freedom to make their own decisions and to be rewarded for their innovation.
3. Money and benefits still make the grade – In case of companies trying to keep their most valuable employees, rewards and recognition stretched beyond “employee of the month” plaques and into solid, competitive pay with regular increases, excellent and innovative benefit packages, and a host of other non-material rewards to accompany both of those basics.
4. Respected leadership – Employees staying committed to the company needed to believe their leader was effective not just in decision making but in communicating change and handling it well.

Overall, employees who were valued perceived themselves as having more value and they therefore, delivered more value as well. They were proud of their companies and increasingly loyal to them. In other words, the investment appeared to pay off in the high-performing companies. For more information on developing and keeping current employee talent contact SkyPrep today!