Building an all-star team takes tremendous effort and investment; sourcing great people, selling them on joining, and onboarding them well. But many companies then neglect to nurture and retain those high performers long-term. To keep your top talent happily engaged, focus on understanding and appreciating them as individuals.
Get to Know Your People Deeply
Managers often stick to task-focused conversations about projects and outcomes. Broaden interactions with valued team members to show genuine care about their aspirations beyond deliverables.
Regularly ask engaging questions and listen intently to responses to customize growth opportunities and work conditions accordingly. Making valued employees feel heard, understood, and cared about as individuals cements loyalty in a way perks alone can’t achieve.
Give Personal Recognition & Thanks
Be generous and creative with acknowledging achievements large and small. Send handwritten congratulations notes when milestones are met, such as a major project delivery, presentation to executives or key account renewal.
Publicly thank individuals for efforts other team members may not be aware of, like mentoring newer hires or volunteering for unglamorous tasks. Consider rewards like choosing special team activities or naming conference rooms for those making exceptional long-term contributions.
Everyone craves appreciation for their hard work. Consistent personalized expressions of gratitude help prevent feeling taken for granted, which is a huge driver of turnover and disengagement.
Support Unique Interests & Passions
The most talented professionals often have rich personal lives and pursuits outside of office walls. Encouraging valued team members to feed passions beyond their core job shows good faith support of the whole person. It increases loyalty, energy, creativity, and commitment to the company in return.
Enable Autonomy & Growth
Micromanagement and role stagnation frustrate ambitious professionals. Provide high achievers freedom to operate independently using their best judgment. Offer visibility to executives through presentations, sit-ins at leadership meetings, and task force roles. Fund continuing education and career development opportunities aligned to personal goals.
Top performers crave higher impact roles, new skills, and creative challenges over time. Keep your best people engaged by letting them spread their wings into new responsibilities versus cornering them into narrow predefined boxes.
Make Compensation Reflect Value
Talented employees know their worth in the labor market. They expect pay and overall rewards to reflect their level of contribution and skills scarcity. Stingy compensation policies push them towards competitors ready to bid more aggressively for their expertise.
Research indicates money itself does not spark lasting satisfaction. But being significantly underpaid for abilities deeply erodes morale and allegiance.
Along with fair objective benchmarking, the experts at Motivation Excellence recommend tying variable compensation and spot bonuses to milestones individuals help achieve. For example, custom employee incentives related to key project deliverables, accounts won, quality targets met.
This connects pay to performance in a transparent way reflecting the unique value being created by your stars.
Conclusion
Global research shows feeling genuinely cared for and connected to managers and organizations drives employee retention more than any other factor by far. People will walk away from great pay, exciting work, and phenomenal perks when relationships feel transactional rather than trusting and appreciative.
The secret to keeping top talent happily engaged is humanizing how you develop, empower, reward, and communicate with them. Show you see valued professionals as whole people with needs and dreams beyond immediate work outputs. Make sincere customized efforts to support thriving in and out of the office.
With determined person-to-person care taking priority over programs, your most ambitious team members will choose to build long rewarding careers with you versus chasing greener grass elsewhere. Retaining all-star players requires understanding and nurturing them on a profoundly personal level over time.