Retaining IT Talent: How To Keep Your Top Performers Happy

CultureFitTechnical Recruiting

Who would want to lose their team’s all-stars? When you have a great team that works well together and each member of the team is satisfied with their professional life, you don’t want to lose this edge.

There is a way you can keep your all-stars, top producers, and team cohesion. The following are strategies to increase job satisfaction.

  • Work from home. Most IT businesses or departments have an internal infrastructure that will already support remote occupations with only an additional VPN or RSA token deployment. An overwhelming amount of employees would rather work from home, for obvious reasons. Furthermore, this can reduce a significant amount of overhead, as well as save the worker time and money commuting. The amount of time and money they save is virtually a raise by itself, thereby increasing job satisfaction. Finally, studies show that telecommuters actually increase productivity.
  • Flexible hours. There’s a stigma attached to “unset” hours that employees suddenly work less. This is baseless, as flexible hours often lead to more hours worked from the employee’s discretion of “what needs to be done.” When people feel as if they’re the one making the decision, they tend to make better decisions. Having hours that solve home-life conflicts, or simply offering autonomy for the people who don’t like getting up at 5am counts for a great deal. It also implicates a level of trust. Not everyone sets their own hours entirely, though. Many trend setters are offering employees a choice of start time between 7-10, ending between 4-7.
  • Add vacation time. This is one of the best ways to pony up dollar compensation and still avoid an outright raise. Most of your top performers don’t go on vacation often anyhow (and if they do, they’ve earned it), so while your employee may be out an extra day or two a year, it won’t cost the company very much. At 80K per year, a week’s additional vacation equates to about $1,600 – or about a 2% raise – the former they would appreciate, the latter would be nothing special, if not outright offensive.
  • Random half days. It sounds bizarre – but it works. If your company is a 9 to 5 operation, offer your top guys the day off if you’re (more or less) caught up; no questions asked, no sick or personal time taken. You’d be surprised what a difference leaving at noon on Friday can make when it’s the “boss’s” idea. It’s an instant morale booster, and an easy way to separate yourself from a less “high-pressure” environment.

While these tips will work wonders for morale – and consequently, overall retention – finding the top performers in the first place can be cumbersome. Locating an employee who shares your company’s vision and mentality is sometimes difficult to come by.

At CultureFit, we have two lenses which together comprise one vision. Our two lenses, or goals, are 1) to recruit and maintain a large candidate base of expert tech talent, and 2) to pair together the top-caliber employees with businesses based on their similar cultural mindset. These “lenses” converge into our vision – to be the best IT staffing firm yielding the highest caliber talent. We are located in Chicago, but work all across the nation. Contact us for a consultation on how we can help build your retention model and reputation today.