How do you reward and motivate long-term employees already receiving high wages?

PUBLISHER: ABSOLUTE HR SOLUTIONS

The key is to remain responsive and flexible beyond your traditional compensation program. If you fail to do this, you will be unable to retain your experienced top employees:

• Allowing employees to work some (or more) hours from home. Telecommuting is ideal for those seasoned employees with high motivation, self-discipline and independence. Employee loyalty and productivity may be enhanced in telecommuting situations because it sends a positive message to the employee that they are trusted. However companies must have mechanisms in place to measure the performance of telecommuting workers.
• Allowing employees to work more hours on certain days and fewer on others, in fixed or variable schedules.
• Allowing employees to work compressed workweeks. For example, you could allow these employees to work extended hours Monday - Thursday so they can take each Friday off.
• Allow two employees in the same job to job-share one FTE (full-time equivalent). This is great way to recognize the employee's personal needs and bring diversity of experience to one position. Generally, part-time employees reduce benefit costs and accommodating those experienced employees who WANT to reduce their hours is great way to save money and retain talent that may otherwise retire or leave the company.
• Career development will help ease employee frustration with performing the same job over and over. If a company can structure career-planning programs, including skill training and job rotation, assignments could be more interesting to many employees. Providing employees with the opportunity to learn new technologies and techniques and perform new duties can help keep valuable staff interested in their work. Providing employees with opportunity and recognition of accomplishments can be a much more worthwhile incentive than any financial incentives a company may offer.
• Early retirement incentive programs, with an option for the employee to be re-hired on a casual or part-time basis can help retain older, more experience staff. The company benefits because it still has access to their knowledge and experience, saving the company training costs and production losses due to other employees using sick and vacation time. If an employee can draw a full company pension and work casual or part-time, he/she has the opportunity to supplement their income and remain in touch with co-workers.

In all cases the programs must be structured to allow the company to meet it's business objectives.