Tips for Improving Employee Retention

The tech industry in San Francisco is extremely hot and employers are having a hard time retaining their top talent. Here are some areas I think that are important to focus on as a leader of a team of 15 people. 

Culture

The company and team culture in an organization and team is one of the biggest differentiators for new and existing employees. Most companies can offer exciting technologies to work on, but very few can also offer the right culture.

I believe culture is defined by the relationships that you build with your team and employees as well as the work environment that you provide them. As a leader it is important to be transparent and honest with your team. When employees trust and believe their leaders as well as the mission and vision defined by you then they have a purpose and cause to believe in.

You must also provide a work environment that is conducive to fostering innovation, collaboration, and work life balance. And don’t forget to have fun with your employees and be approachable, set aside time for team off-sites, team building, training, happy hours, etc. A positive environment will help foster innovation.

Autonomy

Employees need leaders who encourage and enable them to work autonomously. The worst thing you can do is to micro manage your team, which will hinder their ability to learn and grow.

It is important to establish a general set of processes and tools that are used within your development organization, but also allow your team to make their own decisions. We are always looking for new and better systems to improve the development life cycle and most of the changes have been contributions from individual team members.

For example: Our team works across the entire software stack, this requires different build, test, and development tools. We don’t try to force one set of solutions on everyone. Generally we try to standardize on java and javascript, but our teams also choose their own programming languages and frameworks to best suit their projects.

Innovation

The software industry is continuously evolving and there are new technologies, frameworks, and programming languages emerging every day. In order for your team to pursue other job opportunities in the future, they must be enabled to keep up with industry trends. When we hire people I think about not just the current opportunity, but also working together again in the future. 

I encourage the team to attend conferences and hear from peers in regards to how they are solving problems or using emerging technologies at their companies. Conferences are also a great way to present to others what we are working on.

Regular hackathons can be another great way for the team to work with new technologies and explore outside of their current work realm.

Salary

As a leader you can be proactive and make the conversation around salary much easier by initiating it before employees have to ask for raises or come with competing offers.

Salaries are on the rise in San Francisco and it’s important to re-evaluate your teams salaries every six months. It used to be enough to review salaries on an annual basis but because the market is very competitive right now, salaries are increasing much more frequently. Matching salaries based on what the industry is paying allows your employees to stay focused on their current assignments and not consider competing offers from other companies. Interviewing for competing offers to negotiate salaries is stressful for everyone. 

Be sure to recognize when employees are up for promotions or are exceeding expectations. Actively track their performance and provide them with feedback through regular 1:1’s. Positive and negative feedback are important to encourage growth and help foster a great work environment.