There are few professionals that are in greater demand than those in IT, with the very best talent wanted by employers across a diverse range of industries. To retain top talent in this competitive environment, where headhunting and lucrative packages can lure your best staff away from your business can be a challenge. How do you ensure that they want to stay, whatever offer comes?
Retain Top Talent – 5 Key Ways
1. Don’t Make Assumptions About Staff
Just because they’ve never said anything, doesn’t mean that your top talent aren’t considering a future elsewhere. As their employer or line manager, you need to keep up with what’s going on in their lives as well as the wider IT market, understand their satisfaction levels and ambitions, and ensure you’re doing everything you can to make sure their current role can empower their individual goals.
2. Support Your Employee’s
Benefits such as flexible working hours, childcare support and mentoring programmes which are tailored to meet the different needs of your talent are essential to retain top talent. Ensure there’s a work-life balance by implementing leave policies that can accommodate parents’ responsibilities alongside those of their work. Encourage employees to take a break from their duties by ensuring they have the opportunity for vacation, or even sabbatical programmes that enable them to pursue life goals without losing their job.
3. Offer a Personal Development Programme
Empower your managers to identify what your staff need, and then tailor their workflow and development accordingly to help retain top talent. For example, offering short Language courses, funded degrees or tickets to tech events focused in their specific area of interest. Show that you care about their progression beyond their productivity.
4. Motivate Your Teams
In the first place, retaining top IT talent means more than paying them well. It starts with keeping them happy and engaged. Again make sure there’s a work-life balance so that no one feels they’re putting in too much work or runs the risk of burning out. Build in interesting project work, allow individuals to work on their own dev ventures, offer incentives and create an atmosphere where these employees feel appreciated and engaged within your workplace community.
5. Invest in Your Company Values and Culture
Investing in your company culture is a top priority for retaining talent. One way you can do this is to have the right people on board who will be able to improve morale and energise staff through their own values, which they then project outwardly across the organisation. The best employees are the ones that really buy into your mission, and believe in what they’re doing. They want to be part of something bigger than themselves, with a sense of purpose that goes beyond an individual career path. If you can get them to feel this way about what they do for you – it’ll go a long way towards retaining them.
Create Employee Engagement
The best way to stop your top-tier IT and tech professionals from being lured away by competitors is to help them want to stay. Creating employee engagement through offering personal development programmes, work life balance or a strong company culture will help keep them fulfilled at work and discourage headhunting.
Finally, remember that retaining your best IT staff is an ongoing process and you need to be proactive in anticipating their needs and feelings, so it’s well worth setting up regular meetings with them where you discuss what will help them stay motivated as part of your retention strategy.
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