Over 60% of organizations say their top challenge is overwhelmed employees. Turn them into inspired workers by creating a meaningful, rewarding workplace.

In a recent Forbes article, contributor Josh Bersin discussed how Deloitte has found the top two people issues facing organizations in 2014 are leadership and retention. More over, after companies have spent years focusing on cost cutting, restructuring, and pushing people to work harder, today, more than 60 per cent of organizations are telling Deloitte their top challenge is managing the “overwhelmed employee.”

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Bersin predicts that the high-performing employee will soon takeover control of the workplace environment. This group is more apt to consider changing jobs as they seek out career growth, and companies need to cater to them in order to stay ahead of their competition. Thus, helping the overwhelmed employee become the inspired employee by creating a meaningful, rewarding and enjoyable work environment is an absolute must to win in business today.

Top-performing employees are often naturally inspired from within and as a result, they seek out work environments that complement and support their inner inspiration drivers.

We speak to these top-performers everyday, and have found that more and more, there are specific trending patterns of “wants” and “asks” that are popping up on these candidates’ must-have list. Here are the top three priority areas that we’ve identified based on our conversations with the most talented candidates we’ve encountered in the marketplace:

1. Recognition versus opportunity: it’s true that thank you’s for a job well done is important, no matter how small the accomplishment; but today, a more effective staff recognition strategy is to give top-performers greater learning opportunities. Awarding employees with increased trust and responsibilities is a highly effective retention strategy. It not only provides new on-the-job learning opportunities, but also cultivates greater, faster career growth too – something that top-performers crave.
2. Training versus coaching: from a return-on-investment perspective, the #1 challenge with training programs is making sure employees retain the learning beyond the actual training period. Consider moving from short-term training opportunities into long-term coaching programs. The recent book by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor: The New Way to Fast-Track Your Career, was featured in Harvard Business Review and discusses a new trend towards transitioning mentorship programs into sponsorship programs, where senior executives have a built-in organizational responsibility to see the growth of a junior employee (versus a mentor who is often expected to be only an advisor).
3. Cultivating leadership potential: top-performing talent don’t always make the best people managers, but most organizations often reward well-performing employees in their career growth by promoting them into people management positions. New managers in these situations often end up feeling unsupported in new territory if leadership cultivation isn’t woven throughout the organization. The key lesson to be learned here is that leadership development is something that should be considered for employees at all levels of the organization. In the future, leadership training from a bottom-up approach will be much more coveted by top talent, versus the traditional top-down system.

Today’s workplace is increasingly becoming more democratic and collaborative. Companies who are in-the-know are placing great emphasis on this change, building this knowledge into their strategic talent attraction and retention approach.