How to Identify the Key Employees in Your Team

Understanding how to identify key employees in a team or organization is vital for several reasons.

For starters, if you want to grow or reconfigure your team, you need to know which employees are essential to maintain standards, processes, and client relationships. The value of a company is often linked to the performance of its best people. By gauging their influence, you can better plan for their absence – whether that's temporary or permanent.

Meanwhile, if you want to maintain or improve performance, you need to know how to spot and retain your company's most valuable performers (MVPs). These are the team members integral to the short and long-term operational success of a business.

If there's an apparent over-reliance on certain employees, you'll want to negotiate with them directly to keep them happy, engaged, and in place, rather than risk losing them to a competitor.

So, how do you pinpoint the cream of the crop? And what exactly are you looking for? In short, a key employee has a unique mix of personality, knowledge, connections, and output — and here, we break it all down.

In this article:

• What do we mean by a "key employee"?
• How do you identify talented employees in your business?
• The traits key employees share and why they matter

You might think there's a degree of subjectivity when defining a key employee. However, in reality, they all have the same things in common.

A key employee is one whose exceptional performance, skills, influence, and/or knowledge can be tangibly linked to the success of an organization.

In other words, a key employee is so much more than an important, likable, or loyal member of the team. To be considered key personnel, they must:

• Possess specialist knowledge, certifications, or licenses necessary to keep the business operational;
• Positively influence their colleagues (potentially acting as a link between teams or departments);
• Maintain strong relationships with clients and vendors;
• And (above all else) be difficult to replace.

Put it this way: you don't want to lose a key employee to a competitor!

In addition to what we've mentioned above, a key employee should demonstrate the following:

Whatever their role or remit, your key employees find ways to go above and beyond. Whether that's by supporting their colleagues or solving problems for customers, their actions clearly and positively contribute to the organization's ongoing success

Your key employees aren't satisfied with waiting for direction. They're proactive by nature, pitching ideas and following through with a plan to shape the company's future.

If you think of a company's employees as Jenga pieces, some can be removed easily without impacting the overall structure. Others, however, are critical — and if removed, the whole thing can come toppling down

But here's the thing. Spotting these qualities can often prove challenging for business owners (and prospective business owners). When tasked with identifying key employees, they place likability, loyalty, and general "busyness" higher in terms of importance — and this sometimes leads to the genuinely indispensable team members being overlooked.

So, when it comes to picking out the most important individuals, you need to take emotion out of the equation. And that's where people analytics (like Pavooq) can help.

When assessing key employees, you need to take an objective view (one not influenced by feelings). With Pavooq, you can measure how people communicate with one another inside a team, department, or organization.

Our tool builds a work communications graph based on data generated by Slack, which helps HR specialists identify key influencers. Using the chart, you can understand who shapes the opinions of others, who is the most productive, and where issues like a lack of diversity or project bottlenecks might harm overall performance.