Even though this article is mainly addressed to managers, all feedback is welcomed

People tend to change their jobs every one or two years. It’s hard for companies to invest time and money into someone who’ll leave in one year. They tend to avoid people who are not stable, they tend to avoid hiring people who change their jobs a lot. A better approach might be figuring out how to find and hire the best people, and then how to make them stay. How can companies keep their employees for more than one year? You might be thinking: give people more money, they’ll stay if they have bigger salaries. A bigger salary motivates an employee for a couple of months, and then they’ll want more. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be paid accordingly. If they don’t get a good salary from the beginning they won’t start working for a company, so the salary is very important. But there are other factors too and if the managers use them wisely, they will be able to keep the best people. It’s the manager’s job to create the right environment for their team members and the shortest recipe is this: when people feel they can be themselves inside a company, when they feel stimulated and appreciated inside a company, when they feel they are part of a team, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll stick around for a while. By analyzing this even further, we will find three directions we need to focus on: Personal development, Career development and Environment.

Personal development

Being able to do what we like

Imagine you were hired by a new company. What would motivate you the most? Being assigned on a project that you like or being assigned on something you don’t? Many companies believe that once you’ve signed a contract with them, your productivity and efficiency will be the same on any project inside the company. The reality is that people will be more productive when working on tasks that they enjoy than when working on tasks they don’t enjoy. It is very important for people to like what they’re doing. If they love their work and if they love what they’re doing, they will be very productive and very efficient. A manager has to know his team and what each member likes and what they’re good at. Then it’s the manager’s job to align this with the project needs as much as possible. Doing some changes from the management level, might result in having a better team with the same people.

Receiving company’s support when working on personal projects

Allowing team members to work on personal projects might have an awesome effect. Better yet, the employees should be encouraged to work on personal projects. The company might come to implement a new service or product starting from an employee’s personal project. Most of Google’s services were first developed as personal projects by their employees. Google allows their employees to work 20% of their time on personal projects; they’ve proven that this method is working so why not adopt this in other companies too.

Feeling important

Trust the employees. Give power to the employees. Give them tasks but also give them responsibilities. Let them innovate, let them come up with new ideas; analyze their ideas and give them feedback. It shouldn’t matter who came up with a brilliant idea and that person should be rewarded and encouraged to investigate even further. Employees need to be told that they are allowed to improve the products, the process, all the important things inside the company. And not just tell them they can make changes, support them in making changes.

Remove communication barriers

It doesn’t matter if we are engineers or managers or technical leaders. We can all be right or wrong. The days when only the managers were right are long gone (if they ever existed ). Don’t be afraid to admit your mistakes. If you are a manager and you’ll admit you were wrong in taking some decision, you won’t appear weak in front of your team. Instead you’ll get more appreciation from your team. They will feel closer to you. Stop acting like you’re somewhere far away from your team and start being in the middle of the team.

Also, communication inside a company is crucial. You need a platform for internal communication between employees and management, between different teams, between different centers. Companies tend to use newsletters in order to inform employees on new topics. But they are not very efficient because employees cannot give feedback to that. A more efficient communication framework is a corporate blogging platform. This will ease the communication between departments, the communication between managers and employees, the communication between HR and employees. This platform offers you means of communication with your customers too. It’s proven its efficiency so many times with big companies like Sun, Microsoft, GM, and so on, so it should work for your company also.

Feeling that we are part of a team

It’s very important to feel like you’re part of the team. Creating bonds between the team members has a great impact on both individual efficiency and also on team efficiency. If you had to choose between two teams: one where the team members consult each other on technical matters and always make decisions together, and another where team members never talk to each other and decisions are made by the manager, which one would you choose? I would choose the one where the team members are not only coworkers but also friends. There are many factors which glue teams together. A great power in this has the manager by talking to the team and always collaborating with them and assigning them tasks in which the team members have to work with each other. Also, there are team members which glue teams together. Some of them do not have good technical skills or good leadership skills and at first sight you might think “what does this guy do in my team”. At a closer look you might notice that that member glues the team and he or she is at least as important as the other members. It is very important for a manager to identify the role of each team member and figure out how can that team member help in gluing the team.

Transparency and clarity

Tell your employees everything they need to know. Don’t make any suppositions. Don’t lie, be straightforward. People are smart enough to understand what’s going on.

There is a tendency in some companies to try and keep the employees in a foggy state of mind. For example if an employee comes and ask “was there any decision made on this?” or “did you find a solution to that?”, some managers will say “oh, we’re still under discussion”, or “we haven’t made any decision yet”. It is ok as long as it takes a couple of weeks or one month, but if it takes more than that the employees will loose their trust in the manager. Instead of trying to avoid the truth, it’s better to give straight answers and real answers. Straight answers make employees appreciate you as a manager and they will come to you every time they want to know something because they know you’re honest with them. They will start trust you.

Another common mistake that managers make is the supposition that people will come ask if something is not clear. The will not, or most of them won’t. So in order to avoid this situation is better to always tell the team what’s going on and that they are always welcomed to come and ask you questions. Let me give you a little example: let’s say you are using some grade ladder in order to differentiate experienced employees from fresh outs. Let’s say this ladder has 3 levels: beginner, experienced and senior. Probably you are using some salary ranges for each level. These ranges might be public inside the company or they might be private. There is no point in keeping them secret because this will keep the employees in an uncertain state of mind, they cannot know where to evolve, they cannot make plans on their career, so they will probably go to another company where they can plan their future. I’m not stating that you should hang printed papers with the salary ranges on every wall. They can be communicated by mouth, but tell your team from the beginning that they can come and ask, don’t make suppositions like “if they want to know they’ll ask”, because most of them will not. One of the manager’s job is to always keep the team informed and this applies both to project aspects and also to company aspects, politics, decisions and everything that affects the employees.

Aligning the company’s objectives with the personal objectives

You cannot just align some words like “great talent” and “innovation” and expect the employees to start believe in them or even understand them. They all have to be aligned by the manager to the employee’s personal goals. So this is a task that will imply different strategies with each team member. The manager will have to work on aligning one or more of the company’s goals to each team member, depending on what he or she likes to do. If one of your team members is very interested in innovation, work on stressing out the company’s goals that are closer to innovation. If another team member likes process, work on stressing out the company’s goals that are closer to process. If another one is interested in some specific technical aspect, focus on stressing on one or two of the company’s objectives that are closer to that. Do no try to make each member of your team believe in all the company objectives because that’d be pretty hard. Instead try to find what does each member focus on for personal developing or career development, and try aligning that direction with the company’s objectives.

Career development

Being able to plan our career

It is very important for each one of us to be able to plan our career. It is important to be able to plan how to evolve, it’s important to know the direction in which we want to go. One question that is very used in job interviews is “Where do you see yourself in 5 or 10 years?” The answer gives an insight on how can both the employee and the company evolve together. This shouldn’t be only a question, this should be the starting point for a manager with a new employee. This should be the first factor for the manager in planning how to grow an employee.

Evolving inside a company means both money and career. So if I want to make a plan inside the company I work for, I should be able to make assumptions on these two: how much can I be paid in 5 years and what can I be in 5 years.

If an employee does not know how to evolve inside a company probably they will start looking for another job, and they won’t stop looking until they find a job where they can make plans.

Having the right environment

Creating the right environment

Many companies use cubicles because it’s space efficient and it’s easy to prepare the office prior to bringing the employees in. Using cubicles is not very efficient because the environment can become noisy and the efficiency of your team will suffer. Though if you do not have a choice in this, allow the employees to make some changes to their own cubicles. Someone cannot be creative if his or her desk looks exactly the same as all the others. In order to be creative and efficient, we need an environment in which we feel good and safe. We need an environment we like, one that’s specific to our personality.

Feeling no pressure

Some managers have the tendency to stress the team more than necessary. Especially when a deadline is close. It’s good to remind the team that they need to finish by a certain date, but there’s no point in telling them that several times a day. Checking up the status every hour will not do any good to the efficiency, instead it will diminish it. When starting to work on something it takes around 15 minutes to get in the right state of mind, so if the manager comes to check-up on the status every hour, the employee will use only 45 minutes from each hour, and only 3 quarters from each day. Add to this emails coming every 10 minutes, phone calls coming every 20 minutes and other types of interruptions and you’ll see that no one is really efficient more than 50% of the day. And 50% is a pretty optimistic figure.

Conclusion

It is very important to have a motivated team. There are very expensive ways to motivate teams and there are cheaper ways to motivate a team. Some of them are hard to implement and adapt to your team, others are easy to implement and do not need much effort. Whichever methods you choose, it’s better than not doing anything.

Successful businesses and new companies have a lot of key elements contributing to their success. One of them, and a really important one too, is MANAGEMENT. Many businesses started to change the way they are managing people, or they started with a “workers as people” type of management from the beginning. Workers are valued as individuals, they are given more power and more trust; also, the decisions are not taken somewhere at the top and communicated to the workers, instead they are taken together with the workers; managers talk to their people and take decisions based on their feedback. We started to understand that two or more heads are better than one. It was about time, right?
There are many types of management, but if we think about how these types of management see people, we can divide them into two categories. Let’s dive a little bit into these two and see how they influence our company and our company’s success. For the sake of example I will talk about management in a software company, but the examples and observations apply to other types too.

“Engineers as Resources” type of management

Many companies, mostly older companies, use the type of management where they treat engineers as simple resources. No one is irreplaceable or even important and management treats them like faceless people, with no individuality. They don’t care what an engineer does as long as it works fine, to them he’s a simple, replaceable resource. It’s not important if that engineer likes what he’s doing, it’s not important if he’s motivated to do that, it’s not important if he’s better at something else, it’s not even important if he’s looking for another job. All that’s important is for the project to be finished on time and on budget.
Some of these companies try to say that they believe in collaboration, trust, talent, but these are empty words. How can you believe in and pay for talent when you don’t value each individual?
This type of managers also tend to lie to their people. They tend to tell and repeat unclear things and keep their people into an uncertainness. They think that it’s better to lie than to tell the truth because people are not smart enough to understand certain things. Like for example “if this project is not delivered on time and as requested we’ll all be fired”. Instead of transmitting this message, managers say “it’s very important to deliver this on time because … or …”. I think transmitting the truth does more than enough and it motivates people enough to do their job right. If telling the truth doesn’t do the job, than no other lie would.

Problems caused by the “Engineers as Resources” type of management

People working in these types of companies don’t enjoy their work. They don’t enjoy what they’re doing. They don’t feel motivated and they don’t contribute to innovation. They simply execute their tasks and wait for the day to be over. The management team is responsible for creating the right environment. It’s your job to start care about your people, it’s your job to start knowing what they like, what they’re good at, what stimulates them and where they want to go, where they want to evolve.

“Engineers as People” type of management

This type of management cares about the people. They care about each and every engineer. They care about what stimulates his imagination, they care about what motivates him most, they care about his plans or even help him plan his future. This type of managers don’t lie to their people, they are straight forward and honest to their people. Even more, they make decisions based on the team’s feedback and give engineers the opportunity to work on what they want. Let’s take Google for example. Engineers at Google have 20% of their time allocated to work on whatever they want. This means that they can work on anything they want, they can work on new products, they can work on new services, they can work on whatever they wanted to do but probably didn’t have time to do it. From this were born most of the Google’s services. They believe in empowering people. They believe in letting the engineer evolve in whichever direction they want. That’s why they’re so successful. There are many other examples. I’ve read an article a while ago about managers at BMW talking to people on the assembly line, about workers submitting new ideas and being listened by the managers.

Problems solved by the “Engineers as People” type of management

The biggest problem into a company is motivating people. Making them more efficient. Well, here’s the recipe. Let people work on what they want. Listen to them. Give them the possibility to be creative. Involve them when making decisions. Show them that their opinion is important (and I mean really show it, not just tell it). Give power to your team and they will surprise you. Also, allow them to change the environment. Don’t just put them into cubicles with no individuality. How can an engineer feel creative into his own cubicle when all the cubicles look the same. Better yet, stop using cubicles . Start creating the right environment and you will get the productivity that you’ve waited for so long.

Adaptability Century

What type of management to use in the adaptability century? We thought that the 21st century is the speed century, but actually it’s the Adaptability and Speed century. Deliver quickly and with real features. For this you need innovation, you need you’re people’s full capacity, their full intelligence and their full imagination. Start stimulating that. Make people work at their full capacity and make them enjoy it and you’ll be able to achieve anything.

Do YOU need to change anything?

Think about your company, and then think about this: do people at your company wait for 5 PM to go home? Do they start looking their watches every 5 minutes starting from 4 PM or even earlier? Then you need to change something and you need to start right now. Don’t invest lots of money on consulting some specialized companies, instead start asking your people what they want. Ask them how to improve their life and their experiences at work. It might be hard at the beginning but it will pay off in the end.