How payroll can you help you find superstar performers in the workplace

Benoit Gruber, VP, global product marketing at Sage, shares with us how payroll can help you find and keep your star performers.

Finding your star performers

Modern HR and payroll technology can help you manage colleague performance and development. With workforce analytics, you can now find your star performers and keep hold of them. Depending on your industry, the cost of your workforce is likely to be between 30-50% of your total overheads.

Through payroll data you can collect information about salary, absence, overtime, training costs, and return on investment. Cross-reference this data with qualitative information you have about colleagues—how they are viewed in terms of your performance culture by their peers, superiors, and teams—to develop a complete understanding of who your high achievers are.

Create a breeding ground for talent

Trend analysis allows HR to understand the working conditions that allow new stand-out talent to bloom.

For example, if a certain department has a low turnover rate and consistently good appraisals, then using data to find out why will help you recreate the department’s environment across the entire business.

Technology can also provide tools that help you decide which colleagues could benefit from training—it provides valuable insight to inform decisions that a paper-based system could not do.
Turn your star performers into mentors who can help other colleagues who find the business more challenging and need inspiration.

Often the star performers expect support for self-directed training—HR is in an ideal position to help create innovative programs and bring in new training platforms.

Keeping your star performers happy

Top-performing colleagues seek higher pay and greater opportunities. According to a U.S. survey by Gallup, 32% of people cited a lack of promotional opportunities as a reason for changing jobs, ahead of 22% who claimed pay and benefits caused them to seek a new position.* It’s important to identify the stand-out colleagues who are helping to drive the company forward, and do what you can to retain them.

Start by looking at payroll and performance data to make sure that your star performers are getting the remuneration they deserve for driving your business forward. This could mean better pay or bonuses or simply positive feedback showing that you appreciate the extra hours they are putting in.

It’s also worth bearing in mind what your competitors offer in terms of salary, working hours, vacation time, and benefits—you need to be at the very least matching and ideally exceeding them.

You should also have a way of identifying what your star performers value most. There is no point in investing in costly initiatives or training programs if your colleagues aren’t going to benefit from them. Give them the opportunity to shape their own careers and determine how they are rewarded.

Left alone, star performers will see opportunities with competitors. Your payroll data gives you the chance to build a complete view of the talent in your business—what creates, motivates, and retains the star performers, wherever they are in your organization. It’s important to take notice of what payroll data tells you, because once a star performer has handed in his or her notice, it’s already too late.

Find out how Return on Employee Investment can help you find rockstar employees by reaching out to us.

* Gallup, Inc. January 2015