Worth Keeping Organizations today need to re-examine their rules in order to hold top people. First, you must identify the most important people to retain. We find that the best organizations use a defined process to identify who they want to keep, mainly because they realize it will never get done if there isn t some sort of formal mechanism in place. Managers must identify the best employees through focused decision making. In terms of measures, one easy cutoff is the one-third percentile that is, the top third of your employees should receive 90 percent of your retention attention.
Managers don t have the time or resources to lavish attention on everyone.
In any event, one might pick a different percentage as a cutoff, or opt for a different type of measure just make the classification that allows HR to focus retention efforts on the most important people to retain. Another key step is to determine the market worth of each top performer and conduct a vulnerability assessment of the individuals. A vulnerability assessment is to look at the risks the key employees are exposed to on a daily basis. This measure will ensure that you re not surprised by the sudden departure of one of your key employees. It will also provide you with the data you need to make hard decisions if you get into a bidding war with another company for an important employee.