Retain Top Talent

Many of my clients have been lamenting to me for the past few months about underperforming team members and whether they should fire them and replace with them with someone better.

There are lot of things you can do to improve an employee's performance before you reach for the trap door lever. First, are the expectations and results desired clear, precise, quantifiable, and metric based? Are they written down and have you and your employee agreed to them together? Secondly, how often are you having one-to-ones and improving your coaching of your employees? Finally, are you actively working on employee engagement initiatives such as creating personal development plans and implementing a rigorous employee appreciation and recognition program? Simple steps to dramatically boost performance, effort, initiative, motivation, and proactivity.

So many of my clients lack the skills and knowledge of how to have a performance based one-to-one. I talk about this extensively in my Vistage workshop titled Managing Remotely in a Crisis. It becomes very important to have frequent one-to-ones when your team is remote. Excellent article on the steps of having a coaching conversation.

Obviously the author of this article is biased in thinking there list falls in the top 14. However, there were a couple in this article that are pretty consistent from best practice article to article over the past decade. These become amplified in a hybrid work environment. Some of the best ones include clairty about goals, raising the amount of communication, and starting to get managers to stop focusing on employee weaknesses and start focusing on coaching. Finally, there is a need to inject a little bit of humor into the work environment during this covid crisis - my perspective is that many of us have lost our sense of being playful, having fun, joking around, and enjoying each other as teammates.