Retaining Competent, High-Performing Employees

How to Retain Competent and Well-Performing Employees? 

Once the recruitment process and training is over, the focus of the company is to retain their employees especially the wel­l performing ones and the competent ones. This is also a place where the HRM plays an active role. It helps to manage the performance of their employees and give those appropriate benefits and compensation for their incredible performance.

Performance management of the employees

The managers of the organization or the company needs to know whether their employees are doing good job or not, whether they are performing efficiently or not. However, managers have to evaluate these with the different appraisal methods of their performance.

The appraisal method

Majority of the managers have admitted that they have severe problem while giving a critical performance review to one of the under performing employee. However, it becomes more challenging when the manager as well the employee knows that the performance is not beneficial at all for the organization. There are many ways by which a manager can do the same.

Here are a few appraisal method and its advantages as well as disadvantages

• Written essay

In this method, the evaluator or the manager writes down the employee’s strengths as well as weaknesses based on his or hers previous performance and he may also provide scope for improvement in it. The advantage is that it is simple and easy to use.

• Critical incident

The manager focuses on the critical behavior that helps to separate the effective as well as the ineffective performance. Advantage is that the evaluator can use real life example to make the employee understand whereas the disadvantage is that it’s a bit time consuming,

• Rating scale using graphics

The evaluator makes a chart of all the factors and evaluates according to that list. The advantage is that it’s not so time consuming as well as it provides quantitative data, however, it does not provide core information on the performance of the employee.

• BARS

This is most popular method evaluating an employee’s performance. This includes critical incident, rating scale also includes job behavior. The advantage is that it prime focus is on the behavior which are measurable but its very time consuming and to some extent it’s very difficult to develop.

• MBO

Here the employees are evaluated based on how they achieve their targets or goals. This is quite technical and result oriented however, its very time consuming.

• 360 degree appraisal

This includes all the feedback from the employees, supervisors and other co-employees. This method is very thorough however its very time consuming and difficult.

Benefits and compensation

Authorities at Discovery Communication had an employee problem where employees were having a bit of a problem because the top performing employees were being given the same salary as the ones who were under-performing, which seemed a bit unfair. Only way by which managers could give the employees an added bonus is by promoting them to a higher level. Developing a proper benefit and compensation system is a major part of the HRM. This is the only way by which competent and well performing individuals can stay in the company. In this manner, the company can easily accomplish their goals and motive to do well in the industry. According to research, effective compensation program has shown growth in the entire company’s performance. 

Managers have to ensure proper compensation programs to keep the workforce motivated. He might include awards and benefits to employees. Certain methods are salary add­-ons, payment incentives and other services. There are a few organization which impart some unusual kind of benefit for example free baseball tickets, surfing lessons, fitness center and many more such amazing stuff.

Now, you might be thinking how does the manager decide which employee gets what benefit and to what extent. The picture given below shows based on what criterion does an employee gets paid. However, there are several companies which take a different approach as to how one might get paid, for example it might be variable pay or sometimes it is skill based.

The first kind of pay, which is the skill based pay, tends to rewards workers solely based on their performance, skill and competency. According to study this kind of rewarding system makes much more sense and is becoming more and more popular in the industry. However, variable pay is different from skill based pay trend because it solely depends on the individual’s performance and nothing else. Almost ninety percent of the organizations in the US use this scheme to reward their employee for their wonderful work. The traditional pay system was different because it allowed employees at a senior level to be paid more than those who were at a junior level, but whatever is the rewarding process managers should keep in mind to make it fair for everyone and it should be such that they can retain talented and competent individual in their company.

Links of Previous Main Topic:-

• Managers as decision makers
• Foundations of planning
• Strategic management
• Basic organizational design
• Adaptive organizational design
• Managing human resources
• The human resource management process

Links of Next Fundamentals of Management Topics:-

• Contemporary issues in managing human resources
• Case application 1 thinking outside the box
• Case application 2 social connections
• Chapter twelve summary by learning outcomes
• Managing your career
• Preparing for my career managing human resources
• Managing teams
• Understanding individual behavior
• Managers and communication
• What is motivation