Your tech company is transforming — but can it keep up with your best workers?
Companies want to stay up to date as new technologies and capabilities emerge. So do their employees. “If it's disrupting their industry, they have to stay relevant,” said Grant Thornton Technology Industry National Leader Andrea Schulz. “That’s part of why it’s important for companies to have development and training opportunities — in fact, that makes it essential.”
Job seekers in the tech industry expect employers to offer competitive benefits, but they also want jobs that help them build skills and experience, both to stay motivated and to prepare in case they need to seek another job. “When you create development and training opportunities, you're investing in your employees, but then you also need to keep them,” Schulz said.
“You're investing in someone, but now they can take those skills and trade secrets to pivot to another company,” Schulz said. “How are you going to recruit the knowledge you need, and keep that knowledge in your company to see your investment pay off?”
Recruitment
Recruitment is competitive in tech, so it’s important to track the priorities for potential recruits. The recent Grant Thornton State of Work in America survey of HR leaders showed that development opportunities and flexible work are especially important in this industry:
Development is important for several reasons. “The technology industry is fast-paced and tends to attract a fast-paced workforce driven by achievement and innovation,” said Grant Thornton Growth Advisory Managing Director Katie MacQuivey. “Tech companies need to invest time to train and develop their employees to fuel their ambition and stretch them to feel challenged.”
“There are two elements to successful skilling,” MacQuivey said. Effective onboarding sets the foundation for role proficiency, while continuous upskilling enhances proficiency into mastery--and often leads to further evolution of existing or new capabilities. “Successful skilling programs can be a differentiator during recruitment, and both elements contribute to higher employee satisfaction, increased retention and faster realization of business value,” MacQuivey said.
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Retention
When tech companies invest in their employees, they want to retain those employees and achieve a return on the investment. That’s true of any industry, but our tech industry survey respondents seemed especially concerned with some specific factors in development and retention — skills planning, rewards, mental well-being and performance management.
How can companies keep the workers who develop new skills? One answer is to let them move. “It’s important to understand how often employees at some firms are changing positions internally,” said Grant Thornton Growth Advisory Principal Eric Wilterding. “They're constantly trying to move into a new role — it might be a lateral move or an upward move, but it’s never a downward move. It’s to find a new challenge and work with different people.”
However, some moves are driven by dissatisfaction. “The three most important factors for a positive day-to-day work culture that drives people to stay in a role are: trust and respect in the manager; enjoyment and alignment to the company vision and type of work; and team culture and shared recognition of success,” MacQuivey said.
“Often, one of these three factors falls short of expectations, yet it's enough to retain employees because the upside of hitting the other two factors outweighs the negative,” MacQuivey said. “Retention starts to fail and the scales tip when you're missing two or more of these factors.”
“Training managers to effectively lead their teams, set the vision in alignment with the organization, and develop an inclusive high-performance culture within their teams is a necessity.”
To address that need, and the HR leader concerns from the survey, companies need skill development that goes beyond technical capabilities. “Maturing soft skills at the management level is critical given the impact to the employee satisfaction,” MacQuivey said. “Training managers to effectively lead their teams, set the vision in alignment with the organization, and develop an inclusive high-performance culture within their teams is a necessity.”
Companies need to tie effective management into effective culture, making sure to understand how employees feel about questions like:
- Are they buying into the company’s vision?
- Do they think they’re making a difference?
- Is it clear what they're trying to accomplish?
- Are they recognized and celebrated for their achievements?
- Is there mutual trust within the team to help them feel secure expressing their ideas?
“Those kinds of questions make a huge difference in terms of how employees interact with their work,” MacQuivey said.
As managers measure employee perceptions, they also need to measure employee performance. Many tech firms take a data-driven approach that’s focused on performance metrics, but it’s important to balance the metrics with more. “There's benefit in bringing a human side to performance management as well,” Wilterding said, noting that many firms are moving away from purely data-driven performance management. “A number of studies showed that there can be a false level of precision when companies collect and aggregate data to put people into a model.”
“Clear expectations anchor organizational achievement and performance management,” MacQuivey said. “While some roles can delineate success with quantifiable metrics, others have to create objectivity through well-defined goals. For example, sellers likely have clear scorecards and incentives, while a marketer might be focused on long-tail transformation initiatives or campaigns that see delayed value realization. How you can ensure that, in both cases, high performance is rewarded fairly and objectively?”
Performance management can be even more complex when a tech company’s leaders are connecting with a workforce that is mostly or entirely remote.
Remote work
Our tech industry survey respondents confirmed that they are more likely to have a workforce which is partly or entirely remote.
However, our tech industry respondents seemed less confident that their managers are effective at managing a hybrid or remote workforce.
That lack of confidence might come from a greater awareness. “Tech companies often have more access, tracking and awareness of productivity data. That might be showing that remote or hybrid work hasn’t created productivity gains,” MacQuivey said.
That could be why some companies have tried to swing the remote work pendulum back toward the office. “There are certain companies trying to pull people back together,” Schulz said. “We’re hearing about a return to the office with some of the bigger tech players.” However, she said that can be unrealistic for companies that reduced costs or met other needs by hiring remotely or reducing office space.
“Over the past few years, there has been a movement to hire more engineers internationally, in lower cost-of-living centers. Plus, many companies have reduced or eliminated their leased office space because they had to further preserve capital,” Schulz said. “Remote work is here to stay in tech.” So, managers need to be ready to deliver results with remote workers.
Crossing the distance
If leaders don’t think that their companies are effective at managing remote work, how can they improve? Our tech industry survey respondents put an extra emphasis on development again — along with giving workers resources and support.
“With remote workers, it's more difficult to develop those human connections, but it's still just as important,” Wilterding said. “And you need to have a deliberate strategy, with a budget in place, to support those kinds of efforts.”
“It can be small things, like sending gifts to your employees’ homes, recognizing the contributions that they're making with a small gesture, or having those informal meetings where you talk about your lives,” Wilterding said.
By establishing a strategy and budget to support these connections, managers can help ensure that these activities aren’t forgotten in the ongoing rush of daily work. An intentional plan can make the difference between a company that’s truly designed for remote work, versus one that just has remote workers.
“You're making an investment in your workers, but remote workers can start to feel transactional along the way,” Schulz said. “So, what are you going to do to incentivize them?”
“Don’t lose sight of how important it still is to understand who individuals are as people, and to make that human connection,” Wilterding said. “That comes back to some of the things employees are looking for when they join your organization.”
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