What keep people stay in company for more than 5 years? (How to retain talent?)
One of the top factors keeping professionals at their company is having a strong workspace benefits; it’s around 44%. Nothing fancy here and we should respect the simple truth that people work because they need to live a better life. Benefits including those common stuff: PTO, parental leave and health insurance.
More importantly, intangible areas that matters to employees are:
- work-life balance and flexibility (51%)
- foster a culture where they can be themselves (47%)
- Have a positive impact on society (46%)
Perks like free food and game rooms are good but the research shows this is actually one of the least enticing factors for keeping people at their current company (19%). Instead, people would much rather see their company focusing in on benefits like learning and development programs.
Let’s dive a little deeper in those factors.
Work-Life balance and flexibiltiy
Nobody wants to get called during a family event without even paying. Admit it, most of company don’t pay extra to ask people to do on-call (maybe cellphone bill?). If we are getting so many show stopper and engineer has to jump in to help several times a month we need to fix the new development but focusing on fixing that. In some extreme situation, maybe we need ask help during the personal life but the reason should be very convincing and not that often. I would say, 2-3 times a year maybe ok.
If developers need to pick up his children at 3pm every day they should be allowed to do that and they should not feel sorry for that.
Be themselves
A common topic nowadays is whether people should show themselves during the conference call. I would see it really depends on themselves. People should not feel pressured to not share their faces if they don’t want to. Though, at the same time, presenter showing camera is kind of common practice. But for some zoom meetings like incident discussion, really no reason to open camera since people sharing screens any ways.
Positive Impact on society
It’s always good to work on something you believe it’s valuable and help others. That motivate people. So, manager should not only focus on quarterly planning but always the vision for the team. What their team’s goal in one or two years and how that would help their customers.
People should be proud of what they are doing.
What about others?
In a engineering organization, people stay because they are keeping learning especially for those top talent, they feel recognized if they make the impact and they got the support from their manager if they need it (resources if they need, sometimes, they need the real help which need times and effort).
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