The Premier Blog For Learning How To Attract. Motivate, And Retain Top IT Staff
drjim Sorry in advance for going off on a bit of a rant here, but I’ve become fed up with both IT workers and managers who continue to completely miss the boat when it comes to creating, working, and managing exciting and fulfilling IT jobs. This time my trigger was going out to lunch with a … Read more
Amazingly enough, everyone on our teams has a world outside of work. If you can find a way to leverage the skills and talents that your team have developed “out there” then you just may have found a gusher of creativity that will propel your team to success and improve employee morale and boost retention. … Read more
Ouch! one of the worst parts about being an IT manager is when it comes time to fire someone. It really doesn’t matter if the person truly deserves it or this is one of those “cut 10% from every department” exercises. Handling the situation where staff decides to leave by themselves is hard enough, this … Read more
I recently had a chance to talk with a friend of mine who works as a developer in the information technology department for a major telecommunications firm. I was surprised to discover that he was very angry and was thinking about quitting his job. It turns out that he had just completed a major project. … Read more
The engineer in all of us can rise up and take over whenever a problem shows up. In the world of information technology, when either ourselves or one of our staff screw up, personnel issues can get shoved aside as we focus on finding a solution to the problem at hand. However, if you can … Read more
What if…you could somehow find the time to fly out to Boston and take two days to attend the MIT Sloan School of Management’s course on “Managing Technical Professionals and Organizations“? This course is designed for “senior management” but no matter what your title is, you’ve got my permission to attend. Umm, I guess there … Read more
In the April edition of the Communications of the ACM, Peter Dennine and Peter Yaholkovsky discuss an interesting topic: just how do you get a group of people to stop thinking about “me” and start thinking about “we”? They are talking in broad generalities; however, it did get me thinking about how this can be … Read more
As we reach the end of the first decade of the new millennium, the IT workplace is once again starting to change. For at least the next few years we’re going to be seeing three distinct generations working together side-by-side: boomers (born before 1965), Gen-X’ers (1965-1979), and Gen-Y’ers (1980-1999). This arrangement causes conflicts and friction … Read more
We all know that having high turnover can at best be disruptive and at worst can throw projects off schedule, kill budgets, and doom overall employee morale. So you would think that if you are somehow able to have a low number of employees leaving that everything would be hunky dory, right? Wrong — you … Read more
So you’ve finally built a great IT team / department and now you can’t sleep at night because you are worried that everyone is going to leave. Well guess what, you’re probably right — everyone will eventually leave; however, how fast they leave depends on you. The IT field has a rich history of job … Read more