High employee turnover isn’t just expensive. It can be devastating to organizational momentum, team morale, and your company’s ability to innovate and grow. This is especially true when you lose your high performers, those standout employees who consistently deliver exceptional results and raise the bar for everyone around them.
While traditional retention strategies often focus on compensation and perks, the key to keeping your best people is understanding and aligning with their intrinsic motivations. This is where Motivation Code can help.
Why high performers leave
High performers don’t just leave for better pay. They leave when they feel:
- Their unique contributions aren’t valued or understood.
- They lack opportunities to work in ways that energize and fulfill them.
- Their role doesn’t align with what truly drives them.
- They don’t see a path to meaningful growth.
- Their work environment drains rather than fuels them.
Uncovering motivation explains everything
Motivation Code reveals the underlying motivational patterns that drive your employees’ decisions, satisfaction, and engagement. Unlike personality assessments that tell you what someone is good at, Motivation Code shows you why certain activities energize them while others leave them drained, even when they excel at both.
Aligning roles with Motivations
Consider these examples of how understanding an employee’s Motivational Dimensions can transform their experience:
- An Achiever who’s buried in collaborative teamwork might be dying for opportunities to stand out and excel individually
- A Visionary stuck maintaining existing systems needs chances to innovate and create new possibilities
- A Relator handling solo projects remotely could be craving meaningful team connections
- A Driver maintaining status quo operations wants to tackle challenging goals and drive progress
When you align roles and responsibilities with employees’ core motivations, you create an environment where they naturally thrive rather than just survive. The end result is greater productivity, innovation, employee engagement, and natural retention of key people.
Practical steps to boost retention
Assess your team’s Motivational Dimensions
- Have employees take the Motivation Code assessment.
- Seek to understand each person’s unique motivational patterns deeply.
- Look for areas where current roles align or conflict with core motivations.
Customize growth opportunities
- Create development paths that excite different motivational patterns.
- Offer projects that let people operate in their motivational sweet spot.
- Provide mentoring that considers motivational fit.
Reshape roles to fit your high performers’ Motivations
- Adjust responsibilities to better match the motivational patterns of each employee.
- If adjusting responsibilities isn’t possible, reframe the goals of tasks and roles so that each person can better align responsibilities with their Motivational Dimensions.
- Create new opportunities that align with key motivations.
- Build teams with complementary motivational strengths.
Communicate in the language of your high performers’ Motivations
- Use language that resonates with each person’s motivations. An Achiever connects with different concepts than a Relator, for example.
- Recognize achievements in ways that connect with each person’s motivations.
- Provide feedback that acknowledges motivational needs.
The impact on high performers
High performers are often your most motivationally aligned employees. They excel because they’ve found ways to operate in their sweet spot. But they’re also the most sensitive to misalignment.
When their role shifts away from their core motivations, they’re usually the first to feel it and the most likely to leave. High performers have options, and as such, they’re often the canary in the coal mine and a sign of problems in an organization.
By using MCode to understand and honor their motivational patterns, you can:
- Keep them deeply engaged in meaningful work.
- Create growth opportunities that genuinely excite them.
- Build an environment where they can consistently access their best performance.
- Show them you truly understand what drives them.
Create an environment where high performers can thrive
Motivation Code gives you the insights needed to build that environment intentionally, keeping your best talent energized, fulfilled, and committed to your organization’s success.
The cost of replacing employees, particularly high performers, far exceeds the investment in understanding and honoring their motivations. By leveraging MCode, you create a workplace where people want to stay, contribute, and grow. This saves money while building a more engaged, productive, and sustainable organization.
Remember, people rarely leave organizations where they feel deeply understood and consistently have opportunities to work in ways that energize them. Motivation Code gives you the blueprint for creating a workplace that inspires high performance and attracts talent to your organization.
If you’re ready to bring Motivation Code into your organization, reach out to our team for details.
