How to Hardwire Employee Performance and Retention

In a tough economic environment, you must remain focused on getting the absolute best performance from your employees. This requires a systematic routine to ensure your employees are satisfied and ready to perform at peak levels. Employers must tread on shaky ground without presenting additional challenges to their best employees. To maximize performance and satisfaction, employers should focus on rounding, reward, recognition, retention and results.

Rounding is best defined as managers addresses their reports in a one-on-one discussion about how their job is going. Simply, your employers know more about what is right and what is wrong that any manager can possibly imagine. By rounding, managers must create a rapport so employees feel comfortable discussing what is wrong and make suggestions for improvement. The best question to ask is, "Do you have the tools to do your job?" You will be surprised at the responses you may receive through feedback. More importantly, you want to verify that each employee has eliminated any roadblocks that may affect their production.

Reward is important to employees. If you have an incentive that aligns the employees performance with the company, you must be creative in how you reward excellent results. We are not talking about significant monetary bonuses. Rewards can take many forms including money and perks. The point being that great performance from employees will be rewarded as this moves the company forward. In a tough economy, it is easy to lose clients so consumer satisfaction is critical to your business. This is where rewards for performance will keep your top employees motivated to go the extra mile for your customers.

Employees love to receive recognition for a job well done. Recognition should take the form of recognizing excellence of service among the employee's peers and family. You may conduct a special lunch to recognize great performance, special days such as years of service, community accomplishments and even personal accomplishments such as attaining a certification or education endeavor. In addition, you may want to consider sending thank you notes from managers and peers to employees to recognize their behavior. To include the family, mail the thank you notes to their home so their family shares in the recognition.

You can't do enough to keep those employees that account for the top 10% of your employees. Many companies tend to reduce employees during tough economic times. Be sure your star performers are very clear that you intend to keep them employed and will do what is necessary to make this happen. When the first group of employees are released, other employees get nervous and may start to look at other employment opportunities. Don't let this happen to those employees you want to keep on the payroll.

Lastly, the one common denominator to your company is results. Your company must always be focused on getting the desired results or you will eventually find yourself in a very difficult situation. To affect the results you target, align your employees performance with company results. This will create an environment where both employer and employees are in the same boat. Employees must understand their contribution to the company is directly aligned with the operating results of the company. If employees are successful, then the company will be successful.