Job satisfaction – Do you care enough?

I saw an interesting blog post which speaks about making your staff unpoachable, and it got me thinking about job satisfaction. Essentially, making your staff unpoachable can be boiled down to this:

1. Pay them reasonably well
2. Make sure that they enjoy their job more than they would a new one

That’s it – Not rocket science. Ultimately, you need to make sure that the effort (and risk) of finding a new job will not be worth it for your employees. Money is not the biggest factor in this, but the less you pay, the harder you will need to work on other benefits.

The article lists the following points:

• The Push-Me-Pull-You Mechanics
• Sugar vs. Saccharin Deal Sweeteners
• Stake Them to the Company.
• Offer Life, Not Just a Job.
• Offer Opportunities to Learn.
• Let Them Finish.
• Let Them Create.

5 Ways to Make Your IT Staff Unpoachable

I’ll comment briefly on these points.

The Push-Me-Pull-You Mechanics

Essentially, People decide to leave because they are pushed by you, pulled by a competitor, or both. You want to eliminate the push and protect against the pull.

Ebner says a push can be a poorly defined career path, poor work environment, challenging or inappropriate leadership, poorly defined corporate vision, inability to develop new skills and experiences within the company, or a poor work/life balance.

A pull is the perception of a better work situation, a more attractive organization, more defined career path, better compensation or benefits, better work/life balance, and more exposure to emerging technologies and methods.

5 Ways to Make Your IT Staff Unpoachable

Sugar vs. Saccharin Deal Sweeteners

This can be summarised as “Offer real benefits, not just something that could be listed as a benefit, but actually adds no benefit to the employee”

The article suggests paying in toys – Have a budget for gadgets, games and other geek-toys. I have to agree with this.

Stake them to the company

According to the article, “Give them a stake in the company’s success.

“Examples we typically see of clients that have done a really good job of retention is where there is a tangible atmosphere of pride, being a recognized part of decision-making, and being more than just a faceless number”

5 Ways to Make Your IT Staff Unpoachable

While I can agree with this, one thing I can add is make sure that it is real. Don’t pretend that people have a stake when you are going to ignore their input – They will pick up on it and will be annoyed.

Offer life, not just a job

The author claims that a work life balance is becoming increasingly important and that telecommuting and flexible work hours are great incentives.

If you absolutely can’t offer more money, maybe offer less hours. If I worked a four day week with a 3 day weekend, chances are I’d stay despite other offers unless my employer was seriously screwing up in other places.

He also sums up my feeling on this absolutely perfectly with this:

Give them time to breathe and play; their productivity will increase. Remember, the recession caused many talented people to do the jobs of several people. They have been overworked and underpaid for years.

5 Ways to Make Your IT Staff Unpoachable

Offer opportunities to learn

Basically, you need to give people opportunities to advance their careers. In IT, stagnating is career suicide, and if you don’t offer these opportunities, we’ll leave to find them elsewhere.

Let them finish

The author states that “Projects are cancelled half-way though or the goal-posts get moved just as they reach the end.” This is likely one of my biggest job annoyances – Not so much cancelling projects as moving the goal posts. I can fully support cancelling a project if there’s good reason, but having not released a stable feature complete version of the software I work on for over 2 years now, I’m reaching the end of my tether.

Let them create

The author mentions 2 things here:

• You should consider giving top talent their own personal work budget.
• Allowing talent to contribute to other activities also helps.

Both of these are basically Google’s famed 20% rule. Give your employees time to work on other things as well. This applies both to work related activities like allocating time to build tools that would make your employees life easier, as well as non work related things like working on open-source projects.

As long as your employees are not building anything that competes directly with your business, this should be encouraged.

This also ties in with giving employees opportunities to learn.

Resources and tools

This is not mentioned in the article, but I think it is of paramount importance. There’s 2 parts to this. The easier part is to make sure that your employees have adequate tools and whatever extra tools you can throw in that will make them happy. For example, giving a developer a decent PC with a 21 inch screen may be adequate, but paying a bit extra and throwing in a second 32 inch screen makes a huge difference (Both in job satisfaction and potentially productivity).

The second part might be less obvious. Do you have enough employees, or what could you do to make your key employees lifes better? As an example, if you have 3 developers, could you employ a technical support person that does frontline support and filters their email inboxes to make sure they only get the items nobody else can deal with? If you consider the extra productivity you could get out of the developers (Not even mentioning the increase in job satisfaction), you might be paying for a support person and getting the same productivity increase that an extra developer would have given you.

As a key developer in a small company, I would say this would be one of the top things that would make me more likely to stay with the company.

Some final thoughts

There are obviously a lot of subtle things you can do which might not make a big difference, but does add up. Things like having big screens or comfy chairs or good coffee might not be a dealbreaker individually, but these little things add up.

There are of course also the big things. Giving people blame for things that go wrong but not enough responsibility or control to prevent the issues quickly kills any goodwill an employee might feel.

Money might not be the biggest contributer to job satisfaction, but if you can only afford to pay half the industry standard rate, what are you doing to make sure that your employees are happy? For doubling their salary, they might be willing to give up other benefits and take the risk of starting a new job.