Will Money Buy You Love With Employees?

October 10th, 2007

Great article by Kris Dunn on Workforce.com on the role of money in retaining top talent. The article makes some telling observations about what companies can really do to keep true high performers happy.

It cites a poll from BusinessWeek the “Future of Work” which reports that 90 percent of surveyed managers counted themselves among the top 10 percent of performers within their company. The reality is that most employees aren’t stars - but as we know - the real stars are hard to retain. While talent management can go a long way in helping to keep your stars, you have to do more than just the minimum. Automating appraisals isn’t enough. You need strategy to be driving talent management if you’re going to be effective in the long term.

The article does a great job of summing up why money isn’t the key to keeping your stars and goes on to talk about how HR doesn’t have to accept these limitations. Two great points are made here, that web-based talent management systems can really help with: providing feedback to top performers, and on being flexible on compensation.

Any good talent management system should be able to flexible enough to ensure HR can provide feedback outside of annual employee review processes. For a professional services firm for example, HR should be able to provide an appraisal to the stars at the end of a special project so they get the recognition and feedback they desire.

Pay for performance programs when done properly can give companies the latitude they need to be creative in how they handle compensation. For superstars, HR can be more aggressive and reward their hard work and creative thinking. A well-executed program can maximizes what HR does have to offer, and makes the process of doing so painless.

What are you doing for your superstars? How does your employee performance management system make keeping your stars happy that much easier?

Tags: HR, pay for performance, professional services, talent management