Expert Tips: Make Your Employees Stick

Talk with any CIO and you will learn that his biggest pain-point is not technology or IT-business alignment. It is not even budgets or organization culture, though these are often issues that are discussed much in the context of empowering CIOs to become business leaders. The biggest pain-point for the CIO is his ability to retain good talent. This is important because what the CIO is able to achieve depends on the human capital the IT organization has.

Often, the CIO is someone who has risen up the ranks within an organization. But increasingly he finds that the career spans of his team members are much shorter. Not only that, the CIO is finding it difficult to attract young talent.

Attracting and retaining talent in the IT organization requires more than the usual support from HR. CIOs are largely responsible for creating conditions that help attract and retain talent in IT. With increase in outsourcing in the Indian market, some CIOs are happy that they will not have to work at retaining huge teams of tech professionals any more. There is a flaw in the argument. The CIO will still have to retain a small team; the members of such a team would be far more critical than before.

Talent Retention Approach

MTS India has been quite successful in keeping a flat attrition rate for last 3 years. While the attrition in operations has been around 12%, at the management level, the company saw just one exit out of the entire team. It is about providing freedom and learning platform to the employees.

 

During the hard times, MTS managed to retain the employees and poach good talent from the marketplace. MTS was in the growing stage, when recession started impacting other businesses, and instead of a decline, they saw good addition in the team.

Training and Skill Development

A newcomer takes 6-9 months to understand the domain, and almost one year to get productive. Hence it's important to give training. Someone experienced in handling IT in retail or a manufacturing vertical would soon lose interest in work, because of the complexity of the vertical. MTS give priority to talent from similar background.

Though the compensation and appraisals have been as per the industry standard defined by the company HR team, MTS ensured to keep employees engaged and make them partners of innovation. What helps the employees to stay is the individual space, work-life balance, and the work that keeps them passionate and attracted to the firm.Two Ends of the Stick

The main reason it is difficult to attract or retain talent in IT is that it is regarded as a support function. More so, because there are technology based jobs available within the technology industry itself. Then, why play second fiddle?

Professionals in the early twenties would look at the short-term loss of opportunity compared to their peers. The rate of learning, the pace of work, the variety of assignments, global exposure, and the financial gains - the combination seems too good to be missed.

An organization will thus find it difficult to recruit very good young talent. This is the short end of the stick.

Now consider professionals in their early thirties who have worked on various technologies, worked for companies in a variety of industries in various countries. Quite a few of these guys would have grown weary of the relentless running required - working across time zones, travel, stringent delivery schedules, and increased responsibilities.

Such folks might want to pursue a career that utilizes their earlier skills, gives them adequate work-life balance, and a sense of professional achievement. They are the best bets for enriched roles in an IT organization. This is the longer end of the stick. CIOs should take advantage of this.
Talent Retention Approach

It is one of the heart throbbing activities for any CIO. And at Nova, the best talent is retained according to the level and segment of employee retention approach. At the lower level, it is always effective to motivate the employees with appreciation for good work and providing a fascinating workplace. At a higher level, employees should be made to feel worthy and important for the organization. Rather than being the decision follower what helps in retention is to develop their ability to become perfect decision makers.

Perks and Incentives

Nova offers performance-linked perks, many family support programs, child benefit plans, professional and social institution membership assistance, workplace conveniences, security satisfaction, etc.

Training and Skill Development

Training is something not only essential for the employees but also for the organization. The company gives personal and professional development opportunities through various professional certifications and organizes motivation training and skill development workshops for them.Talent Retention Approach

With a high attrition rate in IT industry, every CIO makes an effort to take care of the issues of the workforce. At Evalueserve, the CIO deals with such issues by understanding the employees mindset for their respective jobs. People who are after good salaries are retained by offering them salary hikes, appraisals, etc, and the people who are looking after challenging roles are retained by assigning them projects, giving wings to their creativity. There are employees who want happy moments. For such employees, we try to arrange offsites, send them for few months to our international locations.

Perks and Incentives

Evalueserve provides a platform for its employees to learn and hone their skills through various training programs. Also, focus on improving their soft skills is always on its agenda. The company tries to offer them a good working environment where they can envision growth and mental satisfaction.

The Ways Within - Building the Environment

Folding the Future in: The CIO is largely responsible for creating an environment that makes people stick. It is not about the CIO's people skills alone; it is about the CIO's ability to plot the future and align resources for it in the present. That is, the CIO needs to think about what kind of roles IT would play in the future, what kind of people would be required for that, and how should these resources be identified and groomed for it.

For example, the CIO might envisage a shift in the model for IT infrastructure in the next 3 years. Already, some of the non-critical areas have been farmed out in a cloud based model. Managed services seem to be the model for the future and this would require skills in sourcing, vendor management, and service management. So, the question is - how do I work on acquiring these skills within the team?Plotting Career Paths: Most often, in IT departments within enterprises, job roles are fixed. Someone in the IT helpdesk continues there, and someone in networking continues to manage the network for many years. Done in the name of specialization, it leads to boredom and employees see a dead end.

CIOs are encouraged to plot out career paths for most members of his team. These career paths could include additional responsibility within a stream or moving between streams. This would give the employees a sense of mobility and growth.

Show that IT is not straitjacketed: Beyond plotting career paths, CIOs have to demonstrate that career paths outside IT are also available for people who have the interest and aptitude. This can be done only by having some real examples of people shifting out of IT.

For example, people in the IT helpdesk could use their customer service orientation to shift to the customer care department. Or business analysts could join one of the business functions. Similarly, talent can be inducted from outside into the IT department. The CIO along with HR should play a proactive role and identifying and fulfilling these opportunities.

 

Talent Retention Approach

BSES has a very human approach with a family-like environment with a performance-oriented appraisal. This is the approach which the company has adopted till now to retain the talent in IT team especially when attrition is so high in IT. The company surely takes care of compensation somewhere close to the prevailing markets. This has worked very well and is sustainable with a realistic substance in it.

Perks and Incentives

BSES has project based incentives in rare cases on a case-to-case basis. The certification and charting career progression by imparting in-house training as well as by sponsoring higher education is the most relevant fit. The cross-functional exposure is the day of norms with the company. It largely promotes their inter- functional skills enrichment by providing training with work exposure.

Training and Skill Development

BSES also provides behavioral and soft skills training in addition to technical ones, which benefits both organization environment and the employee itself. It involves the teams in the decision making process at certain levels giving them insights into the difficulties in taking decisions as well as implementing them. Open discussion and mentoring sessions are also promoted.Talent Retention Approach

One of the biggest challenges CIOs face today is pertaining to the retention of talented IT workforce, when they see limited growth options. Talent retention is a major issue for any IT head and has to be dealt with, applying erudition and caution.

Training and Skill Development

Knowledge must be spread within the team rather than a person. It allows a company to pass on the position to the second best person in line. IT heads can build up a team of talented people around different workflows. In addition, there has to be significant emphasis on their training.

It is the duty of the IT head to identify core interest areas with its team members and put them into projects of interest, and allow more space for innovation. There has to be a balance. Projects that excite them can be created to keep their interest intact in the department.

In addition, CIO must also interact with its team members. Counseling of underappreciated, overworked or disengaged staff on different issues and getting entertaining ideas from them boosts their confidence and sense of belonging. However the knowledge resource needs to be decentralized so that the succession does not affect the workflow.
Impart Commercial Skills: CIOs should give opportunities to technical employees to gain commercial skills to begin with. It is the precursor to gaining business skills and domain knowledge. Such commercial skills would include creating RFPs, evaluating vendors, selecting vendors, and negotiations.

Money Matters: Compensation, perks, and non-financial incentives really go a long way. Nothing can replace it. Industry standard compensation, performance management, increments, and promotions should be motivating enough to not warrant attrition purely for monetary reasons.

Financial and non-financial perks and incentives have the effect of enriching the role in the way others perceive it and these incentives deliver the emotional feel-good factor. These could range from educational opportunities, travel opportunities, global assignments, club memberships, and many such things.

The Ways Outside - Building the Proactive IT Organization

The IT organization of today has to be both proactive and responsive. While the latter is well understood, as in, the IT organization's role in responding to the organization's needs and delivering services thereof; the former would require the CIO to play the role of an advocate for and an evangelist of technology.

This has direct implication on how the IT organization is perceived by the rest of the organization. This in turn affects the morale and sense of self-worth of people working in the IT organization. Hence, it is a very effective way to attract and retain talent in IT.

One of the ways to do this is to get people in IT play the role of technology evangelists across the organization. It need not be at the time when a new technology is being acquired. Rather, the best approach would be to do this regardless of whether the organization plans to buy the technology or not.

Small groups of ambassadors can be formed to demonstrate how sales force automation would help, how self-service applications would ease pressure on applications, and how analytics would help marketing. There is a lot of scope for evangelizing the use of social media within the enterprise, how bring-your-own-device (BYOD) is the way forward, or how collaborative applications on the cloud could help small teams work together.

The CIO should use this opportunity to project the leaders in his team and demonstrate their contribution to the business. This will also raise the profile of the IT department. No longer would the people be then seen as the geeky bees in the corner or as troubleshooters to be called when your computer breaks down.