Significant alterations have been made to how we interact with the workforce during the past few years. Instead of quitting an industry entirely, many employees have simply been finding better jobs. Economists have begun referring to this situation not as the “Great Resignation” but rather as the “Great Reshuffle.” Crucial decision factors for employees seeking better jobs generally revolve around compensation, benefits, career advancement, and workplace flexibility.

Therefore, here are three practical, actionable ways we think you can best retain your top tech talent during this age of restructuring.

Create a good onboarding process

Employers need to recognize that it takes significantly longer to recruit someone than it does for an employee to give their two-week notice or cancel their contract. The solution is to bolster retention while ramping up recruiting immediately. To do so, companies need to reconceptualize what it means to be part of their organization. Nothing is more memorable for employees than their first few days and weeks on the job. Their experiences during this time can vary positively or negatively impact their perception of the business.

Additionally, engineers work some of the oddest hours, with enormous variances in productivity timelines. That means that engineering teams don’t all function under the standard 8-5 paradigm – it also means communication is critical during the onboarding process. Ensure that you explicitly set clear expectations for contractors, especially for distributed teams. It helps when everyone understands the expectations around availability and the permissions around unavailability. While engineering entails collaboration, engineers value structure to concentrate, limiting unnecessary interactions during pivotal testing or development stages. 

So, if you have a new employee starting and want to check in, block off time on your calendar to spend with them to answer questions, explain process flow, or just get to know them. Your new employees will appreciate your time, attention, and respect for theirs. 

Offer flexibility

Engineers are creative and passionate about their work. They won’t complete their best work— or stick around— if they feel they are being micromanaged, second-guessed, or underutilized. Given the current talent war for capable professionals, offering your tech talent as much flexibility as possible is vital. If possible, empower contractors to choose which tech stacks they will work on and have a rotation strategy for exposing them to a wide variety of technologies, both legacy and new.

Overall, allowing talent to shape the projects they contribute to and enabling them to work autonomously to a considerable degree are great ways to keep them highly engaged.

Recognize strengths

Another way to utilize flexibility is to allow room for interpretation in job descriptions among your top-performing talent. For example, if one engineer is great at process workflow, let them take the reins in organizing your next project. If another engineer happens to be better at design, allow them to work closer in the project’s conceptual stages. You can also enable cross-functional collaboration, thus broadening the scope of each engineer’s work and permitting engineers to do what they enjoy and feel most competent at.

Create growth and feedback opportunities

Perhaps the most potent tool for retention is to create compelling career paths.  No one likes a dead-end position. Elicit more input and feedback through tactics like surveys and one-on-one conversations with recruiters, managers, and other channels. Ask about long-term goals to better understand where they want to end up. There’s no better way to show you respect them and build their trust in the company than to make them feel valued and heard. Integrate this information into discussions and strategies at the highest levels of leadership and follow up on it.

Providing career development opportunities nourishes budding talent and challenges top performers to grow and excel.

Reevaluate benefits

Also, look for opportunities to upgrade and adapt benefits for a better work/life balance. For example, consider offering virtual classes for skills development and wellness. Some companies even provide digital childcare — hiring professionals who interact with children virtually — to help working parents balance childcare and their careers. Expanding mental health and well-being resources can substantially reduce potential burnout and boost retention rates by demonstrating how much you value your workers.

Retaining talent through the reshuffle

To summarize, retaining top tech talent requires adaptive thinking in current processes. Much like technology, the industry must evolve to keep up. Turnover can be one of the most significant setbacks to productivity because hiring and training new engineers is expensive and extremely time-consuming. Your company can meet goals without distractions with a seasoned and satisfied workforce of loyal and highly trained engineers. Happy people make high performers— period.

Grow with TeamUP

TeamUP makes on-demand talent sourcing simple by providing skilled tech professionals to meet your Tech and IT needs. We focus on helping you achieve your goals to ignite change and accelerate transformation.