Discover four proven and actionable strategies that you can implement to improve your tech talent retention rates and keep the skilled professionals you need on your team, from Don Lynch, Revolent’s Chief Customer Officer and former SVP at Salesforce.
Snapshot of the current state of retention in tech
It’s been a tumultuous few years for talent retention in tech. From The Great Resignation to so-called quiet quitting, businesses have faced countless trends and spikes in employees leaving their posts or rethinking their career paths.
The current turnover rate for tech positions is around 13.2%; higher than the cross-industry average of 10.5%. While some of tech’s biggest names have made well-publicized layoffs recently, research suggests that this influx of talent into the jobs market hasn’t helped lessen the industry’s skills shortage problem.
When it’s skilled tech employees that are walking out at a high rate, the knock-on effect can be especially severe on an organization. Not only are tech professionals harder (and more expensive) to hire due to the field’s growing supply and demand issue, but the valuable technical and institutional knowledge lost when they leave can seriously harm a team’s productivity. Take a look at the costs associated with failing to retain MuleSoft Developers, for example, in this article.
Top 3 reasons why tech employees quit
Let’s address the root of the issue: why do tech professionals quit more frequently than their peers in other roles and industries?
Many tech employees leave jobs for the same reasons any professional does: they don’t feel engaged, appreciated, and invested in their employer’s mission, or they’ve simply been offered better pay or benefits elsewhere. But there are also other, more role-specific factors at play for tech workers.
1. Burnout
Due to the difficulty and cost involved in hiring tech professionals, teams are often understaffed and overworked, leading to dissatisfaction, stress, and burnout. According to a recent report, two out of every five tech workers exhibit a high risk of burning out, leading to higher attrition and long-term sickness.
2. Boredom
In the fast-moving world of technology, keeping on top of the latest developments is essential. The most valuable employees on your tech team want to learn new things, constantly sharpening their skills and taking on new challenges.
Companies that aren’t invested in adopting the latest tech and finding better ways of working will find that their tech staff get bored fast. Tech professionals who don’t feel they have access to the most cutting-edge developments in their field will take their talents elsewhere in search of innovation and progression.
3. Bias
We’re all aware that opening the door to more diverse tech professionals is a key strategy in solving the tech skills shortage. The question of how to get more women and other typically underrepresented groups into tech careers has been a hot topic over the past decade. Resources have been poured into achieving greater diversity and there’s no doubt that positive changes have been made.
But fostering a less homogenous workforce is a long and complex process. It’s not just about attracting people with varied experiences and backgrounds into the industry; we also need to work harder to keep them there.
Inherent bias and inequity still loom large in tech industry culture, and such toxicity drives out talented professionals. Research states that over half of women working in tech will quit before they turn 35. That drop-off means fewer women reaching senior levels in their careers or being promoted into leadership roles. And that lack of representation and visibility only worsens the problem.
4 proven ways to improve retention in your tech team
We all know that interested and empowered employees make for a loyal workforce. But what else can be done to reduce the high levels of attrition we’re seeing for tech roles? Here are four tried-and-tested approaches you can implement to foster a happier working environment that makes employees want to stick around.
1. Get better at managing change
Having effectual change management strategies in place can make a big difference to retention.
In an industry that thrives on innovation, change is the only thing that’s inevitable. But just because it happens almost constantly doesn’t necessarily mean we’re good at dealing with it.
Change management strategy is something that’s been thrust into the spotlight over the past few years, when businesses had to contend with more change in a short period of time than most of us have ever experienced in our lives.
Mergers, pivots in strategy, implementation of new tools; all these things can unsettle the order of things within a team. Even if a change within an organization is seen as positive—a sign of progress—it can still be disruptive to employees.
We know how important it is to build business resiliency, and creating a resilient workforce is a big part of that necessary task. A resilient workforce is one that can weather transformation effectively, adapt to change, and accept constant evolution as the norm. A business that doesn’t have that buoyancy baked into its workforce is far more likely to see high turnover in times of change.
And the key to building resiliency within a business? Trust. Your employees must trust in the company’s ability to manage change. Resilient workers stick out change and upheaval because they know that their employer will give them the information, support, and resources they need to adapt and continue to do their best work. They know that leadership at all levels will take the time to help them understand the reasons for and potential impact of any change that’s afoot, mitigate concerns, and reduce the amount of stress-inducing uncertainty that can be so damaging to productivity and morale.
Communication is critical in handling change, especially when a company has a lot of remote employees. If employees are faced with something that’s going to change their role, an email blast simply isn’t going to cut it. Employees will likely feel like an afterthought if news of such an impactful event is just dropped into their inbox without further context or explanation.
Trust is earned through transparency, consideration, and involvement. Your best employees won’t want to stay in an environment where they don’t feel heard, so it’s vital to help employees feel informed and empowered to influence change throughout the process.
2. Don’t hamstring employees with linear trajectories
Every employee is different, and professional development could mean a variety of things to your tech team members.
Even if an employee is ambitious, craves development, and wants to advance, that doesn’t necessarily mean they would like to manage a team, for example. If you want to retain a diverse and valuable swathe of tech talent, the progression paths you provide should not be limited to the traditional, unbending route from professional to people manager.
Offering parallel paths to progression and advancement is becoming increasingly critical in tech; an industry in which high performance is not necessarily synonymous with leadership.
When the only role a high-caliber professional can rise to is one they’re not interested in (or well-equipped for), employees will see their organization as a dead-end. But given the chance to become even more skilled at what they do best and become subject matter experts, many tech pros will opt to stay within the company. This not only boosts your retention rates but also gives you access to advanced skills without having to make outside hires.
Make sure you know where your employees want to go, what they want to do, and let them know how they can get there with your support.
Offering continuous, unprejudiced feedback on performance can help employees keep track of their development and can be easier for employees to implement.
Your employees should know that you’re invested in and conscious of their progress as you work together towards an agreed goal. And when this goal is achieved, it’s time to stretch to a new one so that employees feel that they’re always moving forward—and in a direction that they chose.
3. Foster inclusivity
Given the widespread shortage of available talent in the market, building diverse tech teams can be challenging. Maintaining them is another matter altogether. Working to create a professional environment that makes everyone feel welcome, valued, and that they’re being treated equally is the only way to retain talent, diverse or otherwise.
Much of the strategizing involved in rolling out diversity and inclusion initiatives can be vague. It’s easy to make statements of intent, but benchmarks need to be outlined and goals need to be set. These objectives should be challenging, realistic, and based on solid data.
Be open to asking what support employees feel they could benefit from. Again, everyone is different, so true inclusion requires some flexibility. Diverse professionals have diverse needs, and the same cookie-cutter policies and processes can’t be used for all employees.
As you develop a more inclusive environment, one that employees want to be part of, the issue becomes somewhat self-healing. Currently, just 52 women are promoted to tech manager roles for every 100 men. For non-technical managerial roles, that ratio is 86:100. But more diverse employees staying in their roles means more diverse leadership as people progress throughout their careers.
That, in turn, fosters greater inclusion as innovative, alternative ideas are brought to the table. Representation improves and other tech professionals can see themselves succeeding within your organization, attracting even more talent.
Offer flexible and hybrid working
This is another easy win for making your workplace more inclusive. We all know the benefits of offering remote or hybrid working models when it comes to employee satisfaction and attracting talent, but it’s also an incredibly valuable tool for supporting workers from a more diverse set of backgrounds and circumstances.
Support employees with caring responsibilities
Employees with caring responsibilities (most of whom tend to be women), employees with disabilities, and those for whom commuting is challenging are among those whose access to career opportunities can be transformed by alternative working arrangements.
Forcing employees into the office five days a week is clearly not a winning retention strategy. Businesses that need employees to be on-site at least some of the time should offer staff as much autonomy and flexibility as possible in deciding when to come in if they want to keep employees on their side.
Consider implementing compressed or reduced hours
Compressed or reduced hours is another perk that can appeal to more diverse employees. Such models can act as differentiators for organizations, allowing them to attract and keep talent by offering them something that will make a tangible impact on their lives. A recent survey found that a massive 83% of tech talent would be interested in a four-day workweek.
Benefits like a four-day week are likely to become more popular as the appeal of other perks begins to fade. Once lauded as a top benefit for attracting talent, offerings like unlimited PTO are now viewed with cynicism thanks to employers’ failure to follow through. Particularly in the tech realm, many employees cannot take advantage of such offerings due to massive workloads and understaffed teams.
4. Invest in your employees’ professional development
Over the past few years, the battle for talent has driven up salaries for tech positions, creating bidding wars and making compensation the most significant factor in attracting skilled workers.
But that now appears to be changing. What tech talent wants more than anything is the opportunity to develop themselves professionally and progress to new heights throughout their career. A lack of career development and advancement has been revealed in many reports and surveys to be the top reason tech professionals leave their jobs.
In one survey of young tech workers, respondents were asked what makes an ideal company to work for. The top choice? “A company that can offer a secure compensation package and a career development path.”
With technology in a constant state of evolution, it makes sense that tech professionals constantly want to adapt, innovate, and learn about new products and processes. When there are new skills to be developed, top tech employees expect to be at the front of the line for such investments. Organizations that focus on internal upskilling, reskilling, and stretch opportunities by offering continuous training will retain talent better than those that look to recruit the necessary skills from the outside.
Provide engaging professional development opportunities with Revolent
Covering Salesforce and Microsoft Cloud products, our ReSkill program is designed to imbue your employees with practical, business-ready cloud skills and certifications.
These programs, with full and part-time options, empower your business to build advanced, specialist cloud capabilities in-house, tailored around your existing projects and business needs, with minimal disruption to business continuity.
And with an industry-leading first-time pass rate of 83% and 60% of time spent on practical, hands-on learning, you can be sure that your employees will be ready to make an immediate impact in your business.
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Transform your employees into skilled, certified cloud professionals ready to support your business objectives with Revolent ReSkill.
