Keeping Your Successful Employees

How can you keep your successful employees? These are the individuals that contribute to the company on a daily basis and really make it into a stronger and profitable organization. They are also the individuals that you can entrust with a lot of responsibility and know that they can handle anything that you throw at them. Employee retention for small business owners can often be challenging as you do not have the same resources and things to provide to your employees like larger companies do. However many people say that working for a small business where they are respected and appreciated is much more rewarding to them than being paid a higher wage.

A lot of small business owners have found that using some type of incentive plan is a great way to reward your successful employees and to keep them for many years. Using an incentive plan you will be able to show employees that there is the potential to earn more or to be open to other benefits and things if they can meet company expectations and will be able to continue moving the company forward.

What are the qualities of your successful employees? You need to list these out so it can help you to determine the performance standards. It is also important to identify the behaviors that are unacceptable and ones that you need to change. As a leader you need to set the tone for the rest of the staff and must be able to influence them and really guide them.

Use employee surveys and other things to help you figure out how you can provide employees with the incentives and things that they really want to have. Ask them how they feel their performance should be measured and you also need to ask them questions about pay and job quality. Gaining the information right from your staff members will be able to give you an advantage as you are creating a good performance-based program to really motivate your employees.

If you do choose to use an incentive program to motivate your staff it is important that you introduce it to your employees in a clear and precise way. They need to be able to understand what they must do in order to be eligible for the incentives and need to know the factors that you are using to grade their performance.

Usually incentive programs will follow something that can help the company to grow such as having a new quality improvement program or setting goals for your individual departments. In order to get your employees to participate and to really try for the incentives you need to give them reasonable rewards. Simply offering cash will not motivate some people but when you tie it to something else like a salary increase or a decrease in how much they need to pay for health insurance and other things, it will easily motivate them. Rewards like new televisions, vacations, or time off may also get attention from your staff and they are great incentives to consider using as well.

You also need to focus on setting incentive targets for your staff so they know when they can obtain these incentives. Some companies do them monthly where others will do quarterly or yearly. You need to set a target so the employees really do understand what goals they need to set in order to be eligible for the incentives. Employee retention is one of the keys that you must work on in order to have a successful company and one that people really appreciate working for.