Glue employees don’t take the spotlight but they’re as valuable to employers as star performers

So a glue-employee is one who gets the best out of a team. But here’s the catch. In a fiercely competitive workplace, where top performers are rewarded while the rest are relegated to the ‘better luck next time’ bucket, the glue-player often gets shuffled in with the rest.

This can be a big mistake by managers who rose via the ‘high performance at any cost’ route and have had little training or inclination to appreciate someone who did not take this fast track.

I recalled a former colleague who fit the mould of a glue-player as if it were made for him. A good performer and dependable colleague, he helped many of us out of professional ruts that came more frequently than we had expected. At the end of many an event, he was mentioned in appreciation emails from bosses, an acknowledgement he invariably shrugged off. Never the best, but always the one who stitched together pending work when others slacked off.

In the end, the team won. The business won. The slackers went unnoticed. The top performer mopped up some credit. And the glue-employee quietly faded into the background.

I thought of other glue-employees that I may have known, and I realized that whenever I have been pushed against the wall because of a work deadline, the team’s best performers did not always help out. My slips would have never impacted their career trajectory, so why bother?

But there were a few who volunteered help. They thrashed out the work with me, stayed late, checked after submission and brought out a few chuckles with anecdotes of past slip-ups on their part. Was I grateful to them? Of course. But did I credit them with any of my career success? Admittedly, no.

Somehow, our goodbye letters tend to point out the achievers who helped us improve our work, but rarely those who helped us go through the routine grind, battle monotony and get bigger projects by putting in a word here and there on our behalf.

The Wall Street Journal interview had a point on compensation and whether glue-players should be rewarded the way high performers are. It made me wonder if it is even possible in India Inc, especially in large organizations where getting lost is easy.

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For glue-employees to be recognized formally, employers must improve how they document work contributions. This could mean detailing the roles played behind a project, instead of the task being chalked up to the designated team’s leader alone.

Such a company would soon notice that some employees’ names pop up frequently. These could form a long-list of glue-players, with endorsements from others used to create short-list. Over the last three or four years, high-potential employees have got pay hikes of 1.7 to 1.8 times the median raise; this should be offered to glue-players as well. Their retention may be more valuable to employers than they realize.

In times of uncertainty, companies that keep glue-players bonded to their roles may find they have just the right team cohesion needed for superior results.

The author writes on workplaces and education at Mint.