FCCS News & Insights

Keeping Top Performers and Recognizing your Team Members

It’s a well-accepted business tenet that human capital is an organization’s most critical resource. Motivated and engaged employees delight customers, create efficiencies and deliver innovation in products, services and processes, all contributing to the company’s bottom line. Attracting the top talent to your operation and keeping them on-board and performing optimally requires a focus on building a strong business with a welcoming culture, and rewarding and recognizing performance.

“People want to be associated with a winning organization, so it’s important for every business to talk about why they’re successful and their vision for the future,” says Chris Keller, Senior Vice President of Talent and Leadership Development with FCC Services. “Potential and current employees also want to know how their roles connect and contribute to the company’s success.”

Finding the best pool of applicants depends to some extent on the specific job position. “Companies looking for talent need to be present where their candidates will be looking,” says Chris. Many organizations are utilizing social media sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, or online job posting sites like Indeed and, for Farm Credit, the System’s national website Careers page. 

A new platform active in the current job search environment, especially for marketing and sales professionals, is Pinterest. Job seekers can get a sense of a company’s culture and overall tone by following their pin boards, and can create their own boards to build their brand and position their professional experience. Also, many independent career experts are using Pinterest to help job seekers in this new environment.

Proactive outreach to candidates in similar roles at other organizations is also becoming an important recruitment tactic in today’s competitive talent market.

For entry-level or intern positions, university career fairs still offer some of the strongest opportunities to connect one-on-one with candidates, as hundreds of motivated students recognize that the fair is the best place to connect with and learn about a potential employer. With many ag-related jobs remaining unfilled, including entry-level roles, the personal connections available at career fairs also help differentiate a company from its competitors. 

“Career fairs give us the opportunity to reach out to the students and explain our culture, which is important to today’s young employees,” says Beth Oliphant, Recruitment and Selection Specialist with FCC Services. “The career fair is not just about collecting resumes. I usually bring representatives from specific positions, like an appraiser or loan officer, who talk to the students enthusiastically about their specific jobs, what their day is like, and why they enjoy it.” 

Once on-board, retaining top performers at every level is critical to long-term success. High turnover is disruptive to operations, lowers morale, and hits the bottom line: it typically costs three times the salary to replace an employee, from recruiting, hiring and training to reaching full productivity.

People want to know what they need to do to be successful in their positions, so setting clear expectations and defining responsibilities is an important first step in establishing a good relationship with an employee. Many, if not most, people also want to advance in their careers, so offering professional development opportunities and defining careers paths, either at the personal or job “family” level, strengthens employee connection to the company. 

At a deeper level, being included in a formal succession plan ties a top performer even closer to their organization, as the next step in their career path is defined and specific learning and development opportunities are offered to ensure they’re prepared to succeed in the new position. While succession planning is most often focused on the executive level (see related Customer Spotlight article), some organizations build succession plans that incorporate most, or even all, positions in the company.

“If you don’t understand your employees, where their skills are, and where they should be in the organization, they won’t develop professionally, they’ll become less engaged, and the top performers are more likely to leave,” says Jay Lux, FCC Services’ Vice President of Organizational Effectiveness Consulting. 

Employee engagement is tied directly to retention, and engagement surveys are a powerful means to discovering overall and department or group engagement levels, and where that engagement is strongest.

“Overall, if an employee is engaged with their manager, their team and the culture of the company, they’re less likely to leave,” says Nicole Sullivan, FCC Services’ Associate Consultant and Recruitment Specialist. “Our surveys also show that employees who feel valued and recognized are more engaged with the company, and therefore more likely to stay.” 

According to research from O.C. Tanner, employees who feel appreciated at work are less likely to leave than those who don’t. In light of this, a growing number of organizations, including FCC Services, have formal recognition programs in place that include service awards for tenure as well as performance based awards and peer appreciation. 

“It increases morale when someone knows their hard work is recognized, and in some cases, hearing it from a peer is even more meaningful than from a manager,” says Jessica Ricciardi, FCC Services’ Human Resources Manager. The FCC Services program includes public recognition in three separate categories, some of which carry monetary awards, at each quarterly employee meeting. Jessica’s advice for organizations creating employee recognition programs is, first, to tie the program to the company values, and second, to keep the program simple to increase participation.

While recognition programs can increase engagement by creating a culture of appreciation, and engagement surveys can tell senior management where the organization stands in a broad sense and help define areas where new practices can be implemented to increase engagement long-term, there may still be employees, even top performers, who are less engaged and more likely to leave the organization. 

Identifying such employees is up to their managers, who should pay attention especially to their top performers. If an employee seems at risk of flight, senior management should be willing to take steps to retain them. Sometimes this may include increased compensation, but just as often it’s about recognition and development.

“Money itself won’t bind an employee to a company,” says Chris. “But if an employee is feeling valued, that they’re contributing to the business, and that they have opportunities to grow, they’re likely to reengage. Engagement is contagious, and when these core principals are in place, people will want to stay.”