Finding & Keeping Key Employees

This past month, I was honored to be a speaker for a Family Business group on the topic of Finding & Keeping Key Non-Family Employees.  As I told the person responsible for the program, ‘keeping’ was going to be my focus (‘finding’ happens if keeping is not as successful as desired).  

Zoom Poll

One of the Zoom features we used was a Zoom Poll, a question that over 200 attendees could answer.  The question was:  Does your company have a retention program?  There were five answer choices:

• Yes.
• No.
• Working on developing one.
• Thinking about developing one.
• What is a retention program?

Yes was not the majority response - it was not even close. 

McKinsey & Company did some ground-breaking work on War For Talent

I believe the first work completed by McKinsey & Company on the concern over an upcoming War For Talent was back in 1997.  They came up with a list of Talent Imperatives that is still valid for organizations today.  Here are a few of them for your use - as the pillars of any retention program:

• Instill talent mindset (it starts with the President/owner)
• Create “extreme” employee value proposition:  Why do I want to work here?
• Recruit talent – continuously!
  • That includes referral programs (for current employees)
• Develop talent (create a plan – 2, 5 and 10-year ideas)

Yes - my firm is in the hiring space.  We certainly want to be your Executive Recruiting partner.  That said, we hope it is for expansion reasons. 

For 2022, let’s talk about retention and finding! 

Wishing you all a Happy, Healthy and Safe 2022 and beyond!