When the economic situation improves, employees walk: Are you ready?

Just as you think your company is coming out of the repressed economic times and you can focus on improvements to the bottom line linked to project success, the idea of your talented employees going elsewhere may not be a factor you have considered. Worse, if they do walk, there is a skills shortage so it is harder to replace them. Can you do anything to mitigate this? Have you even thought about it?

The Hay Group have conducted research into the trends for employees moving jobs worldwide and predict that the UK will see this peak in 2015. The poor economic times meant that employees were prepared to stick with a job because there were genuine fears that there may not be another around. But, as the economy improves and confidence improves, employees will find that there are more jobs around. This means that they can leverage their expertise and skills for more money and they do not have to put up with aspects of their working environment they haven’t liked.

The Hay Group list five factors that have an impact on employee retention as:

• Confidence in the organisation and leadership
• Room for employees to grow
• A fair exchange between employee and organisation
• An environment for success
• Authority and influence

Here is the Hay Group web page. It’s worth watching their 2 minute presentation on ‘Preparing for take-off’ to get the impression of why and how they have reached their analysis. It’s linked to from the page.

These wider concerns for a company are echoed in ‘Higher pay does not equal higher retention rates’, HR Review, 26th February 2014, (look at the quoted last paragraph for this.) Also, ‘Great with Talent’ has researched ‘Why employees leave and retention for 2014’, meaning improving retention in 2014, we believe.

Well, do your employees line up with those the Hay’s five factors? Would you know? It’s interesting that more and more companies are conducting ‘exit’ interviews with employees who are leaving to get to grips with aspects in the company that work against retention. These ‘exit’ interviews need to be handled well, of course, so there are specific training courses to prepare people to get the truth from leavers, and, even specialist companies that will do this for you (See ‘Great with Talent’, as an example). Do you have anyone qualified to conduct ‘exit’ interviews? Are you prepared to use the information positively to change your company?

It may well be worth your while, as the costs of recruiting someone are real costs. There’s the recruitment agency fees (if you use them), time for reading CVs and interviews, meetings to make decisions, then the integration time to up-skill him/her to get them working efficiently for your circumstances, teams and clients. You may well have to take on a contractor to cover the interim etc. The Hay Group mention 12-18 months to find and get a new employee up to speed. Is this true for you?

And, just to rub it all in: there’s a great question in ‘The Value of Project Team Members’, Francis Hooke, 19th February 2014, that asks, ‘If you are a project manager and you completed your project on time, in budget, but 30% of the team members have left the company, did you fail?’

See Quality Project Delivery for the answer!

When turning it off and on again doesn't work

It has always been one of my nightmare scenarios: a software update that goes wrong. The average web site now has so many dependencies ... the OS, Apache, PHP, MySQL, JQuery, Drupal ... to name but a few of the pieces of software, many open source, that need occasional updating on your site ... that it is difficult to keep up. Therefore I have every sympathy with the banks whose systems failed to recover from a maintenance update the other week. It could happen to anyone.

I realise that the bank problem was real heavy-lifting IT, and the interactive media world rarely strays into that kind of territory. But occasionally it will.

So what do you do when it happens to you, and especially when you're the code-monkey who pushed the metaphorical or even literal button to kick-start the mayhem?

According to the brief biog at the foot of his pages, Register writer Dominic Connor 'used to boss around gangs of quants, developers and sysadmins before moving to a life of headhunting in the City spiced up with consultancy' and 'Before becoming a City headhunter, ... was a mildly competent head of IT as well as developer for various banks. RBS still run some decade old code of his, he wishes them good luck with it.'

His two pieces on the subject published on the Register last week make for interesting reading, especially if you manage an IT team or are part of it. I recommend them:

Do you work in IT at RBS? Or at the next place to get hit ...? (June 29) How to survive a crisis.

So, that vast IT disaster you may have caused? Come in, sit down (July 3rd) Welcome to the world of forensic interviewing.