A tech giant recently released its annual attrition report. In the tough COVID times, when the job market is in shambles, over 20% of employees exited the organization. The brain drain and the subsequent damage to the business growth is anyone’s imagination. Losing 20% of employees may not impact your business adversely, but the big question is did you lose your High Potential (HiPo) employees?

The business aphorism of 80% of work is done by 20% of the employees holds true across the geography and verticals. Your business success lies in identifying, nurturing, and retaining the 20% high performing high potentials.

Why do you need to identify the HiPo employees?

Achieve Business Success: Business growth necessitates taking adventurous and risky endeavors to move beyond the comfort zone. HiPo employees with unlimited self-motivation, unrelenting determination and focus, and ruthless innovation are the right candidates to take you beyond your usual growth levels.

Engage with Challenging Projects: HiPo employees need challenging and unique assignments that test their limits. They become restless with regular mundane tasks, which is neither good for their growth nor company’s. Identifying HiPo employees is essential to delegate interesting projects under valuable mentors to engage, nurture and strengthen their professional development.

Make Retention Decisions: Replacing employees is a costly affair.  Even you are hiring an employee with relevant-industry experience, there is a learning curve. He/she needs to absorb your company’s work culture, learn effective ways to apply the generic industry knowledge/expertise to your company’s specific objectives. And the cost becomes exponential when it comes to replacing HiPo employees. You need to know who your HiPo employees are to make the right retention decisions.

Create Career-Boosting HiPo Programs: Development programs designed specifically for the capable high-potential individuals shape their career growth and prepare them for leadership roles. The specialized training program includes challenging stretch assignments, developing business acumen, expanding their cohort network, and coaching self-management skills. This program is not for everyone and is targeted to nurture HiPo employees. They need to identify the right individuals to make the programs successful.

Tips to Identify the HiPo Employees

Self-Motivated: They are highly motivated. They work extraordinarily well even under stressful and highly challenging environments.

Go-getter: They don’t wait for the opportunity to be given. Instead, they aggressively seek opportunities and demonstrate their worth with their high performance and achievements.

Natural Leaders: They provide the right guidance and direction to the team whenever required and don’t shy away from leading.

Innate Decision-Making Skill: They instinctively realize the right and wrong choices with unparalleled business acumen. They can make futuristic decisions with absolute insight and clarity.

Over Achievers: They are consistently high performers. They are committed to their work, never underperform, and always deliver more.

Role Model for Others: The above-mentioned virtues make them the best role model for the team and the organization. Their success and the recognition they garner sets the bar high and motivate others to emulate their feats.

Unlocking HiPo Scores for Employees

Now, you’ve successfully identified the HiPo employees in your organization. Performance Management tools like Synergita help you aggregate their HiPo score from their potential, performance, and criticality metrics. This helps you determine the employees with the right balance of potential, performance, and criticality attributes. This score aggregation method potentially eliminates manager biases and provides a true picture.

Benefits of Synergita’s HiPo Score:

1. Enables you to make the right retention decisions,
2. Identify the right employees for your expensive HiPo programs,
3. Delegate challenging and engaging assignments and projects to nurture and utilize their capabilities for mutual benefit
4. Create custom reports for managers, HR teams,  and organizations
5. Develop and adopt talent management conventions from insightful HiPo analytics