This is the second post of a 2 posts series about recruitment, onboarding and employee retention and separation. If you haven’t read the first part yet I strongly suggest that you do. In the first post I covered the first steps of an employee into the team and even the company. In this post I will try to cover how to keep good team-members in our team and how to deal with employee separation.
The employees of a tech company are its most valuable asset. What makes them stay? How do we prevent them from leaving? And how to deal with their separation, if and when it happens?
Retention
So, we now have an employee in our team. This employee has already gone through a proper onboarding and he\she is an integral part of the team. This is where it gets tricky. There are so many different types of people out there and each individual has his/her own personal drives and motivations that govern whether he/she will stay or leave.
There are thousands of webpages citing hundreds of researches regarding employee retention. Here I will share my personal perspective (you may find more about the subject from other sources for example here and here and work your own way from there). Out of the many reasons out there, I would like to point out 6 main factors that would make an employee stay in an organization: salary and benefits, team (boss included), interest and challenge, career prospects and personal development, stability or fear of change and of course job security, role availability and lack of opportunities outside the organization. These factors change also as a function of geography, age and maturity in the industry.
The last two factors, for obvious reasons, are out of our control – once the employee overcomes his fear or outside opportunities open up, he/she is gone.
The same more or less goes with respect to salary – sooner or later someone will offer the employee more than what we can afford and there is absolutely nothing we could do about it. There is, however, one exception that we can influence this and that is with on-site and off-site employment. There are many (many!!!) employees that leave their jobs because of commuting time to work. Nowadays, the physical distance in km to work does not reflect the actual time it takes to get to work every morning. When the commuting time to and from work goes above a certain limit it will frustrate the employee until it reaches the breaking point. When and where possible, it is better to submit to a certain employee’s request for more work-from-home hours then, because of a matter of principle, to completely lose the employee. Do your math when insisting on office presence, is it worth the price that follows.
Let’s dwell on the remaining reasons. A good boss may well be the reason that a great team of professionals stay together and which in turn draws more quality people to the team. I have seen an amazing team, in less than a year after their team leader was promoted and another took his place, go from being the most professional with the best deliveries in the R&D group to the worst. The frustration caused by dis-harmony with your teammates constantly stays with you even when you’re already home with your family. This situation is totally undesirable and will cause even the best employee to look for opportunities elsewhere.
Diversity – A Door To Higher Creativity Or A Hazardous Team Breaker?
A quick word about diversity; Diversity nowadays is a very popular buzzword and rightly so. In every aspect, the more diverse the team is the more innovative and creative deliverables you will get out of that team. That being said, not every diverse group of people functions as a team. In each recruitment process, whether internal or external, one must think very carefully whether that additional person is a good fit for the team. Before everyone jumps at me, as an example the following is a personal event I had; an operation manager was added to a group of operators for assistance and direction. This operation manager was “old school” with tons of experience from his years at competing companies while, the team was mainly comprised of younger employees. The team gave this operation manager 3 months of grace at the job but shortly afterwards the strongest members of the team started leaving to other groups in the firm or completely left the company. It took a while but the department manager figured out what the reason was for this team falling apart and that it was that particular operation manager’s approach and had to demote him. That was not a good fit but not because of professional reasons but because in that recruitment there was a clash of generations which as a result caused constant tension in the team.
Interest and challenge with talents can be maintained quite easily as long as we are aware what makes that person tick. Though time-consuming, periodic talks with your team-mates is crucial. By doing so you are feeling the pulse of your team and thus understanding what makes them happy with their job and which specific tasks they hate. Sometimes we have no choice but if and when we do, try to distribute the tasks according to both proficiency and employee satisfaction rather than just proficiency.
Which leads us to personal development and career prospects. To keep an employee happy, we should also develop the skills needed for that employee. This is a win-win situation as we, this employee’s leaders, gain higher expertise from that employee while simultaneously the employee acquires another skill in his skill set. Over the years I have noticed that professional employees that regularly participate in courses, professional training, conferences and so on tend to stay longer in the same firm.
All of us have or should have a career plan; l quote an old mentor of mine “always know what you want to do in 5 years’ time. If your current position is not on the path to get you to that goal, start looking for another job”. When someone aims to be the head of R&D, you’d probably want to mark him on the management path and try to lead his skill training that way and if an engineer wants to go on the technical path try to accommodate his development path that way.
Management Is Not For Everyone
A frequent mistake in R&D is, because of their seniority (not of course against their will), promoting perfectly capable and satisfied engineers to a management position either as team leaders or project managers. The mistake here is in incorrect identification of what makes an engineer tick both in the organization and the employee himself\herself. In many cases for obvious reasons, the promotion to manage people has merit to the employees but simultaneously without knowing it might make them miserable at work. It is important to coordinate such promotions with HR and to verify with their reps if it is indeed a right fit and this especially when it is the first time a person is being taken from an individual contributor to a team manager or team lead.
In the old days the role we spent the most time in, unwillingly, is the one we performed worst in and this only because we went unnoticed for promotion or shifted to another role. I am happy to say that the industry has grown beyond that flow and more and more organizations these days differentiate the professional path from the management path when considering a person’s career and salary.
There are obviously more reasons that affect the decision of whether an employee will stay or leave but if and when you’ve tackled these 6 main factors you would be more likely to have kept your team intact.
Separation
There are many reasons for an employee to leave the team or for the team leader to ask to part ways with an employee. Employee reasons are basically the retention reasons we have covered in the last section but also personal reasons that are outside of the organization-employee relationship; promotion, relocation, marital and personal issues, heaven forbid health issues and so on. If the employee has declared his\her desire to leave there is sometimes room for negotiations; terms of employment, promise of certain roles etc. However, there are times when the “desire” to leave is only another means of negotiation for a better position. I personally have never tried to persuade an employee to stay. If this ploy is part of the employee’s negotiation tactic, then that’s not how I conduct my professional negotiations. If there is a real desire for the employees to leave, I wish them the best of luck trusting them to being capable of making their own decisions.
There are the reasons for the work-place and in particular the team leader or direct manager for employment termination; company\department closure or lay-offs, professional fit issues, inter-personal fit issues and finally legal matters or misconduct. I will start with the latter. In such cases make sure to adhere exactly to the instructions given to you by legal and HR and let’s hope that the police is not involved. These are very uncomfortable situations so handle them with great care. Other than these particular cases, try to make the separation as pleasant as can be. You never know what the future holds and today’s former work-place is tomorrow’s recommendation. Whether you are the staying party or the leaving party, try to end things well.
Always Try To End Things Nicely
Organization lay-offs are in a sense the “easiest” because they are not personal. Of course, the employee is not going to feel that way, but somehow the justification of the lay-off is not under your jurisdiction.
The tricky lay-offs are the non-fits be it professionally or socially. Regardless of the organization protocol, if the employees have been working in the company long enough we must create some improvement plan for them so as to try and fix what’s wrong (BTW, if an employee is employed in the company less than one year treat it as a bad recruit and don’t bother with the improvement plan, unless required by law or protocol – it is a waste of time and effort). This is a very dangerous process, especially for the team around the to-be-fired person. In closely working teams there are not many ways to keep secrets so, when the to-be-fired employee is a no-fit and undergoing an improvement plan, the rest of the team would probably have to participate in this plan. So instead of the expected termination the team has to work even harder around that person in order to assist him\her in the trial for proving himself\herself. Make sure you do not burn the rest of the team out in the effort to be fair with that person since by doing so you may forfeit twice – once, the waste efforts to keep that team member and twice, the result of burnt-out team-members wishing to leave.
Regardless of the circumstances, giving someone the sack is never easy. It usually means giving bad news to a close friend and shattering his\her world. I hope and pray you never need to do it.
Whether you are a team leader or an employee, don’t linger with the separation decision, If it’s not a good fit, update whoever needs to be updated and start the process – the longer you delay in making the decision the worse it will be afterwards for both the team (yourself included) and the employee.
Regarding a separation decision as an individual contributor, I have a very clear rule of a thumb; if for 3 weeks in a row you wake up on a Sunday (Monday – whatever week-days your workplace follows 
) morning with no desire of going to work after the weekend I have a talk with my manager. If after the next 3 weeks in a row again waking up at the beginning of the week with the same feeling, edit and update your CV and in parallel have another talk with the manager. Then, after a further 3 weeks in a row nothing has changed, start going for interviews. By doing so it leaves sufficient time for sudden frustrations to go away and for management to react in-time to make, in your direct work environment, changes for the better.
Retention vs. Separation Costs and Effort
There is a bottom line for employee retention and employee separation which is translated to cost and effort. A great talent may ask to be exempt from all the tedious drudgery and be granted benefits that the rest of the team do not have. So, directly and indirectly, the actual cost of this employee is higher (someone has to do the chores). The cost and effort of replacing that specific employee with someone new may postpone our entire project and leave a big knowledge gap for the information that person takes with him\her. The balance is very fine. I would say that with time and experience one may learn the subtleties of this balance but society changes, work standards change and organization development processes change so what was the right balance point for talent preservation 3 years ago is unbalanced today. Consult with your peers and colleagues (not necessarily from your place of work) and seek advice from the HR reps. It’s not easy but can be made easier by solving it as a group.
To sum things up, there are a lot of ins and outs when it comes to building a team, keeping it running smoothly and not letting a random recruitment or retention mishap tear the team apart. The way you treat and lead your team will determine who would come and work with you, who will leave you, how and why and also eventually with what feeling you will wake up in the morning and go back home in the evening from work.
The best example I could give is a small company I worked for which was led by its two founders. In a meeting with all the veterans of that company everyone stated that it was their leadership that kept the whole operation i.e. R&D, manufacturing, support etc. – as one unified unit which in turn held everyone content with their workplace. It was a family, in the full sense of that word. I do not use the word family often when referring to work places…
I hope these last two posts gave you an insight as to how you may improve your team, recruit better, maintain better and even leave better, so that your day-to-day experience would become the most pleasant place possible and this to everyone’s benefit.