Danielle Summers

In the tech world, staff retention is becoming a bigger and bigger challenge. People are moving between roles more often than ever before and there’s a simple reason for this:

Stagnation

Stagnation in a role breeds resentment, disillusionment and a constant feeling that the grass is always greener somewhere else.

So what do I mean by Stagnation in relation to the tech industry? As individuals in a rapidly evolving field, feeling left behind by the technologies, principles, behaviours and culture of our workplace makes us feel like our value is stagnating – perhaps not within the workplace, but within the wider industry as a whole.

Your top performers came to you at a time when their skills were most valuable, their experience most in demand and their ability to deliver ever more challenging products was what they were most proud of. They had value within the wider field, not just to you as an employer. After getting to grips with your products, culture and ways of working, these individuals need to pour more and more effort into staying relevant in their field outside of work while these new skills and experiences go unused in work. This is where they feel their career is stagnating.

As employers, there are a few things we can do to help this situation, to help our technical staff remain relevant, challenged and valuable – not just to the company, but also to the industry as a whole.

Survival of the Fittest

An engineer – software, platform or tester – who feels listened to will stay with you because they feel valued, but don’t take their feedback and forget about it, actually act on it.

Too many companies are folding, going bankrupt or getting hit with massive GDPR fines because they can’t stay relevant, so listen to the people who know what they’re talking about & take action. Your staff don’t want to be made redundant, just as your staff don’t want the reputational hit of being part of the team that didn’t patch those security holes. They don’t want your company being on the front page of the papers for the wrong reasons because that’s their reputation that’s at stake too, so listen to your staff and prioritise the things they say are urgent.

Just Keep Building

The second is training and development. Having a training budget, encouraging (but not forcing!) upskilling and cross-training, plus encouraging accreditation or certification in various areas will add immediate value to your staff. Make sure you put those new skills to use though! There’s no point encouraging an engineer to get certified as an Azure Devops Expert when you have no intention of using ADO! Upskilling and using those skills to stay relevant maintains that engineer’s value in the industry, so use it. Maybe expand their responsibilities, promote them, and pay them more for simply being more valuable. Whatever you do, make sure it’s in their interest as much as the company’s otherwise they’ll take those new skills somewhere else.

Leading by Example

Another key area of focus is in your team and department leadership. If your leaders and managers only ever tell and never listen, you’re in for a problem right from the start. Your managers are going to make or break your company, so invest in people who not only want to be better managers, but also want to empower their teams. There’s an endless supply of training and development for managers and leaders, from reading a few common books like Accelerate and Drive, to attending courses, lectures and workshops.

When I made the leap into management and team leadership, I had no guidance, no support, no training. I had to learn in my own time and grow on my own in a company that didn’t understand individual growth. It’s taken over half a decade to find a company who want to invest as much into me as I do, and the difference is jarring in the best possible way. My management style has improved massively in the last 3 months since I started my new role, and I can comfortably say my team are happy with what I bring to the table, how I listen and support them, and how I guide them towards ever greater successes.

Never Cut Culture

Finally, and quite possibly the hardest to handle, is culture. If these engineers work within the confines of a blame-culture, where any miss-step results in reprimand or finger-pointing, they’re not going to stay long.

Nobody should ever feel these things, so fix it now.

So I’ve told you some key areas to focus on in order to retain your technical staff – and honestly, it’ll work for pretty much any person in any industry. The question is why? Why spend time and money on keeping people? Why put the effort into empowering your high performers when they’re already high performers? Why bother changing anything at all?

Money.
It costs you, as an employer, more money to hire someone to replace a leaver than it costs to keep them. When an engineer hands in their notice, you’re already losing money. They’re already clocking out because they’re on their way out anyway. Their performance will have already dipped, then they’ll have to write up handover details which is time not spent working on the things that need doing. Then you’re spending time reading CVs and interviewing candidates – all this costs money. Then you’ve got to get your new hire up to speed with how things operate, which reduces someone else’s performance until they’re sufficiently able to fly solo.

All of this costs money. All this will slow down production, it’ll hamper delivery schedules, it’ll impact team morale and ultimately will mean your products start to fall behind against competitors, costing the business more money that you can never get back.

Some engineers will stay for 2 or 3 years, learn all they can from your company then move on. That’s their M.O. The minute they get bored, they’re on Indeed.com. Most will want to stay if you give them simple reasons to stay, and every day past that 3-year mark is free money for the company. It’s another day they’re sharing their knowledge with their peers. It’s another day they’re a high performer delivering ever more challenging products. It’s another day where their value to you and the industry is not only respected, but valued and remunerated.

So quite simply, investing in your staff and the culture in which they work will save you money in the long run while making everybody around you feel like YOUR company and YOUR team are the place to be.

This is a brutal realisation – that you will save money by improving your company culture, but isn’t this what every business really exists to do? To do more with less, achieve more but spend less. The technology is there to increase performance and throughput. Microsoft Word was made to make it easier to write things down. Excel Macros exist to do complex math so you don’t have to. Websites deliver data, news, anything really, so you don’t have to go out to a library and pick up a dusty old book. We invest in technology to improve our performance, so why not invest in culture and ways of working to do the same?

I’ve personally worked for a lot of companies in my time. My current employer is my 9th since leaving University. I’ve worked in a lot of tough places and some truly amazing ones. The companies that keep people the longest are the companies that prioritise personal development, satisfaction and inclusion above deadlines and profit forecasts, and unironically, they’re also the ones I found to be doing better in the industry when times get tough.