Employee Retention in the Tech Sector

It's 10am, Friday morning, in the open space area where software engineers gather, chatter and code away on the next project they were assigned to.  The Lead is taking a walk around the space when her key senior software engineer asks to speak with her, “Let’s grab a coffee..”.  And they do. And she knows...  While heading to the coffee shop, the employee tells her that he's been solicited by another employer and has accepted their job offer as a Principal Engineer, working on tech he's been yearning to work with for the longest of times.  Of course, she tries to convince him to stay.  She relays all arguments and options she can find for him to continue his path with the company but is unable to provide the necessary "hook" that will have him do so. And he leaves.  And some of his teammates soon follow...

This scenario happens daily in most tech companies around the world. Even the biggest tech giants are not spared. A recent Silicon Valley Business Journal analysis found that Facebook, ServiceNow, LinkedIn, Tesla, VMware and Google had the hardest time retaining workers, with average employee tenure ranging from 2.6 to 4.3 years. In a 2018/2019 PayScale report, the median Google tenure was 1.1 yrs and Amazon's median tenure was of 1.0 yrs. In most tech companies, these median tenures are a combination of a hyper-competitive market, hyper-growth and the fact that most of these companies have only existed for 20 years or so.

In our talent shortage era, loyalty has become a non-issue for these technically savvy, skilled and sought-after employees.  If they are not engaged in meaningful work and feel as though they are not benefiting from the experience (both based on personal criteria), they will simply raise their hands and a few - if not several - job offers will come their way.  In a heartbeat. No questions asked.

Hence, retention of key tech talent has become a "something to keep you up at night" type topic. And please, don’t kid yourself, ALL your tech talent is at risk.  There are too many wonderful employment opportunities out there and not enough talent to go round.  So what do we do?

In a nutshell - ASK!

As surprising as it may be, your own employees hold the answer to this key concept.  The retention of tech talent is unfortunately not a "recipe-based" solution. "Do these 7 things and tech talent will come knocking on your door!!", is NOT the way to go. Don't get me wrong, some or all of those principles may apply, but it’s not because a certain marketing aficionado-management guru-TEDx speaker literally sells you an idea on retention that "totally makes senses" that the concept will actually work out for your team, talent segment and/or organization.

With my clients, the successful approach has always been to ask the targeted internal tech segment/employee pool about what mattered most to THEM in the context of work, culture, career development, social implication and leadership style.  For you to find your own “secret sauce”, you need to consult the internal pool of employees that you want to retain and for whom you want to make sure engagement is at the highest level.  One caveat is that the retention drivers of certain employee segments most probably won’t be the same for all employees. The more customized your retention strategy will be to each and every one of your employees, the more impactful it will be. And in turn, equate to an increased intent to stay with you.

This does not mean that you need to do everything for everyone; "au contraire", you need to make sure that you understand the data that is provided to you while consulting with your employees in a very objective manner.  Organizational constraints may not enable you to deploy all solutions that have been proposed to you.  And so, the management of their expectations throughout the exercise will be key.  But with the collaboration of the targeted segment of employees, you can come up with a plan from which you are able to extrapolate a win-win on both ends.  An increase in employee engagement and retention, along with deploying solutions within your means and constraints.  Notwithstanding the fact that the tech employees taking part of the exercise will most probably feel very engaged by the fact that you have integrated them in the solution.  Solution democratization is the way to go!

The resulting outcome may be very innovative, inspiring and "out-of-the-box". Which, in the tech world, is always a good thing.

For those of you who have used this type of approach, care to share your story?