A true key employee has three critical qualities. He or she has a direct and significant impact on the value of the business. The employee's role in the company, responsibilities and decisions impact sales, profitability, growth, product development or another critical value driver in the business.
Retention strategies are policies and plans that organisations follow to reduce employee turnover and attrition and ensure employees are engaged and productive long-term. The key challenge for businesses is ensuring a retention strategy aligns with business goals to ensure maximum return on investment.
What's a Top Performer? How do you recognize a top performer? They are the employees who regularly go beyond their job description, seek out growth opportunities, have good people skills and demonstrate leadership potential. Top performers also handle pressure with grace, share praise and accept responsibility.
- Make an effort to understand your staff. As a manager, it is crucial that you understand your staff, what motivates them, how they become successful, and what makes them fail on the other hand.
- Take on individual coaching when necessary.
- Apply tools to distinguish difficult high performers from the rest.
How Managers Can Best Motivate Top-Performers
- Give regular feedback. Top performers are engaged in continuous learning, constantly looking for ways to sharpen their abilities, expand their skill sets and take on new responsibilities.
- Practice career pathing.
- Encourage mentoring.
- Don't micromanage.
- Editorial Contact.
What Are the Qualities of a Good Employee?
- Leadership Skills.
- Organizational Skills.
- Excellent Written and Verbal Communication.
- Intelligence.
- Active Listening Skills.
- Honesty, Ambition and a Strong Work Ethic.
Here are a few traits that top performers have in common:
- Quality as job one. Top performers consider quality a priority over simply getting things done.
- Skills development.
- Fearless decision-making.
- Desire for input.
- Self-direction.
- Cool under pressure.
- Good people skills.
Characteristics and behaviours that may help you identify top talent among your employees
- Positive energy/attitude.
- An entrepreneurial spirit.
- Innovation or creativity.
- A commitment to your startup's culture and mission.
- Effective communication skills.
- Integrity.
- Teamwork.
- A customer focus.
Ability and social skill may be considered talent; but potential is talent multiplied by drive as this will determine how much ability and social skills get put to use. Drive can be assessed by standardized tests that measure conscientiousness, achievement motivation, and ambition.
First and foremost, a valuable employee knows right from wrong and chooses what's right all the time, even when it's not the easy choice. When an employee shows good character, it reflects well on the company and builds trust. Another valuable character trait is dependability.
But per most research, only about five percent become high potential employees.
It's common for companies to use the term "associates" to describe their employees. Even though an employee works for another person, the term gives a more equal feeling, as if everyone is working together in a collaborative relationship.
High performers fail to get promoted because they are good at their jobs, the bosses need the job done and they don't think they can hire a replacement as good as the high performer. But whenever one of the high performers applied for a new position or sought a promotion, they were shot down every time.
Confidence gives top performers the ability to calmly analyze situations and solve problems, even when the deadline is staring them in the face. They know when to compromise and when to stand firm. Good people skills. High performers tend to have larger professional networks than average workers.
High performers stand out from average performers in any organization. They consistently exceed expectations, and are management's go-to people for difficult projects because they have a track record of getting the job done. As a result, most managers focus exclusively on performance, and that can be a problem.
There are four major types of employee benefits many employers offer: medical insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, and retirement plans. Below, we've loosely categorized these types of employee benefits and given a basic definition of each.
