Make sure your IT talent is always nearby

Competition for qualified talent remains strong in today’s labor market. The increase in pay and the high demand for technology professionals mean that they are more eager to seize new opportunities.

According to a recent LinkedIn study, the technology sector faced the highest turnover rate compared to other sectors, with 13.2% in 2017.

While the money talks, when it comes to retaining the technical talent you want, salary isn’t everything. Company culture and career opportunities have a huge impact on the desire to stay, especially when you’re faced with trendy start-ups or high-paying tech giants.

Inspiring your superior technical talent to stick with you may seem like a constant and difficult battle, but it really doesn’t have to be that way. Here are some tips to ensure that your best employees stay close by:

Understand what your employees value: Meals served, foosball tables, entertainment rooms, and pet-friendly offices.

I once asked a boutique employee, a famous capsule coffee brand, if she would like to work there. She said yes, and that the main reason was because management cared about them. I asked what specifically that meant. The answer was simple and at the same time overwhelming: they serve us fruit juice.

Of all industries, technology offers some of the most elaborate and modern advantages to help attract and retain talent. But do they work? Sure, they may be attractive in the early career stages, but if you offer these perks without understanding what employees actually need to do their best work, you’re unlikely to notice an increase in retention rates or the productivity of your investment.

We suggest that the best way to know what your employees want is to engage with them and find out what benefits they value. Crucially, make sure you follow what they said. After all, talking to employees is how Facebook improved its benefits in the first place. Every year, Facebook invites its employees to conduct a benefits survey that measures satisfaction and engagement with the benefits program.

Share the vision: Meaningful work is important for all technology professionals, and with the nature of their role, it can be easy to box them into the technical position. Take the time to help them understand how each of their roles is contributing to the organization’s mission and vision and highlight how important their work is.

Employees who understand their purpose and contribution to the organization’s overall goals will be more committed and engaged.

Salesforce has a unique model called V2MOM (vision, values, methods, obstacles, and measures) that aligns the company’s leadership and strategy with the goals of each employee.

Each employee’s V2MOM is unique to them but is aligned with the company’s V2MOM. This makes it possible to clarify the direction of the business and allows employees to map their goals according to the business.

At Lucent Technologies where I worked, we had the GPP (Global Performance Plan), which was nothing more than an A4 sheet crossed in half. On the left side, we had what was expected of us for the coming year, with clear and easy-to-measure goals. On the right side, each employee entered their results obtained during the period and the entire assessment was measured there.

Also know that 90% of the job of retaining talent is working with middle managers.

People leave managers, not organizations: technology professionals don’t just want to be left alone to code, they want to be able to contribute ideas and offer new ways of doing things, so they employ managers committed to helping them growing employees.

They must be good at motivating and inspiring their team members, managing performance - good and bad, and setting useful goals.

Specialized managers generate performance, engagement, and retention and play a key role in achieving business goals, so reward managers who do so successfully.

It is also advisable to take time to analyze what your organization does to develop its managers.

Encourage professional and personal development: by investing in the development of each employee, you help them get closer to their professional goals.

Promote conversations that allow them to be honest and open about what they want to achieve, both professionally and personally. In a developer survey, Stack Overflow found that technology professionals prioritize opportunities to work in different or more technical roles over other factors by a large margin.

At Lucent, the GPP, as mentioned above, always had two or three personal goals that the employee had to seek to achieve. It could be taking a driver’s license, learning a new language, etc. And that was part of the employee’s assessment.

Encourage the guidance of ambitious individuals to direct and train junior employees. Send employees to conferences and meetings and give them a chance to work on other projects. Recommend online courses, webinars, and communities for employees who want to increase their technical skill set.

All that said, it’s important to create a culture of promoting from within: Creating a company culture that values employees’ career advancement will lead to greater involvement and retention within the organization.

Rewarding high-performing employees demonstrates that you care about their career progression and development. It will also help create a talent stream for the leadership of your organization. With highly skilled tech professionals already in short supply, it makes sense to cultivate your candidates from within.

Invest in your technological talent and they’ll invest in you.