In a recession, how do you increase job satisfaction and retain top talent?

A great question! I'm no HR specialist, but from what I've seen at successful companies, here are a few ideas.

1. Challenge your talent. Give them projects that play to and leverage their strengths, and tie success with those projects to success for individuals and the company.

2. Communicate with your talent. Don't miss any opportunities to engage with them, especially around the economic and competitive challenges you're all facing together.

3. Value your talent. As hokey as it sounds, people like to know that they are valued for their contributions to larger goals -- such as organizational survival -- and need to be told when they are.

I believe entrusting responsibilities and assuring them that they are one among the best. Talking with the talent is another measure of retaining as the talent feels like being an integral part of the company.

Opportunity - to be part of the process to identify key issues and actions to get the organization through the recession.
Time - ability to give the talent reasonable time to achieve miletones to complete projects that build morale for the talent and department as a whole.
Recognition - for a job well done.

I prefer a slightly different approach from those above...

1. Identify the top talent in your organisation - sounds obvious but it is amazing the number of companies that fail to do this and end up in a panic when that talent leaves

2. Talk to that talent - use the right method here to enable your talent to communicate honestly if necessary use an outside agent like an HR consultant, to guage firstly how they are feeling in the current conditions, and to find out how to improve their happiness

3. Take action - now you've asked, start to deliver and you'll probably be quite surprised by what people want and how easy it is to accomodate if you're brave enough to do so. Expect - better work/life balance issues, overwork, under challenged, communication problems, and so on, none of which require companies to spend much money to resolve.

4. Plan for a future without that talent too - no daft "ostritch" approach to your top talent's ability to leave, no matter what you do some people will leave anyway, start planning how to ensure that you are not relying on single individuals and spread the responsibility and knowledge so you can cope with the loss of talent and have a successor ready to take over when it goes

This is a great line of questioning, and one that I believe will be prevalent as we continue to move out of the recession. The first thing that has to be understood is that employees need to be viewed as Human Capital. That is, they are assets and very valuable! In many organizations they may say that, but the question becomes what are they doing to SHOW it?

One of the first things that I look to in this type of situation is to do some simple performance evaluations. This involves surveys, focus groups, interviews, review of extant work, etc. Through this we can see if there has been an increase, decrease, or simple maintenance of performance. That in and of itself can indicate if there are any issues, and help guide decisions towards where to make improvements. This is probably one of my personal favorite parts of what I do, because it usually creates a huge "ah-ha" moment for the senior leadership when they can see some quantifiable data describing the organizational environment!

Once you have identified these pieces and parts, you can implement activities and initiatives that can help to both improve engagment and job satisfaction, while subsequently improving job performance and, more than likely, profitability.

There are many things that could be identified for improvement or alteration, including communication, 'real" company culture, personal/professional development, accountability, training, process improvement, etc. Most importantly though, the information must be gained from those that are being affected: the "front-line" employees. Also, if there are major changes happening within the company (ie introduction of new culture, leadership, technology, systems, etc.) there needs to be an appropriate change management process completed. Otherwise, employees can and will get burned out and feel unappreciated.

This is just a quick, high-level overview but if you have any further questions please feel free to contact me! I hope this helps!

I've always found that a comprehensive personal and career development process works well for top talent. Especially if it gives them opportunities to stretch themselves and involves them deeper in the workings of the business.

Too many organisations display a fear of developing top talent to the point where they may lose them. In truth, if an employee feels valued by their employer and trusted enough to have their career and development personalised, it becomes a serious loyalty factor.

The biggest challenge in retaining talent is not about pay, but about the quality of Leadership they receive. People do not leave their job, they leave their boss. Good leaders hold onto their best people and are not afraid to reward and respect their talented people.

Besides, you are only looking at the 20/80 principle. It is not as if you have to do this for everybody.

The most effective route is to adopt a learning culture, develop mentors and coaches throughout the organisation. In this way, the top 20% take the next 20% under their wings and so on down the chain. Eventually even your marginal performers get coached to higher levels of performance, while the gap between the performers and the non performers becomes such that the fat can be easily dealt with in the appropriate fashion without having a negative impact on the rest.

Without a clear focus on performance and it's management, cuts in labour become random and highly negative.

Wow. No wonder this site is seen as a panel of expertise. I agree with all of the above. Here's what I would add. While the economy slow and you have more slack in the pipeline, take advantage of this opportunity to develop your talent. Provide coaching training to your leaders, then monitor how often they coach your talent. Coaching is not just for correcting poor performers. According to the Sales Executive Council, it can also be used to retain top talent.

Also, use this time to run leadership workshops. People love to be developed. It give you a chance to reinforce your company culture, and it gives the employees the feeling that that the company cares about them and their future.

Thanks Tony,

You just reminded me of the experience of one of my client companies, some time back. They had a talent retention problem. Their top sales people were leaving for sales management positions at their competitors.

Essentially this is more a problem for their competitors, as in general, the qualities that differentiate top sales people, are not compatible with management. It appears to be a well known issue, but it still amazes me that organisations can mistake sales performance for management ability.

However, I digress, the issue for my client was one of losing top revenue generators. I reviewed sales to manager promotion success rates across the industry and was able to demonstrate the poor success rate of such moves.

The solution lay in recognising the top performer rather than promoting them to their level of incompetence. In my client's case, we trained their top performers as coaches and assigned them to new hires with a small commission on the new hire's sales.

The impact was great. The new hire got up to speed on the job much faster than expected and the top performer's performance also increased.

The lesson, don't under estimate the impact of non pay factors in the reward equation and give serious consideration to a coaching and mentoring strategy for performance development. A very cost effective development and retention tool.