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Tactics to Retain IT Talent

Keep talent from walking out the door by discovering and addressing moments that matter and turnover triggers.

  • Regrettable turnover is impacting organizational productivity and leading to significant costs associated with employee departures and the recruitment required to replace them.
  • Many organizations focus on increasing engagement to improve retention, but this approach doesn’t address the entire problem.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • Engagement surveys mask the volatility of the employee experience and hide the reason why individual employees leave. You must also talk to employees to understand the moments that matter and engage managers to understand turnover triggers.

Impact and Result

  • Build the case for creating retention plans by leveraging employee data and feedback to identify the key reasons for turnover that need to be addressed.
  • Target employee segments and work with management to develop solutions to retain top talent.

Tactics to Retain IT Talent Research & Tools

1. Tactics to Retain IT Talent Storyboard – Use this storyboard to develop a targeted talent retention plan to retain top and core talent in the organization.

Integrate data from exit surveys and interviews, engagement surveys, and stay interviews to understand the most commonly cited reasons for employee departure in order to select and prioritize tactics that improve retention. This blueprint will help you identify reasons for regrettable turnover, select solutions, and create an action plan.

Tactics to Retain IT Talent Storyboard

2. Retention Plan Workbook – Capture key information in one place as you work through the process to assess and prioritize solutions.

Use this tool to document and analyze turnover data to find suitable retention solutions.

Retention Plan Workbook

3. Stay Interview Guide – Managers will use this guide to conduct regular stay interviews with employees to anticipate and address turnover triggers.

The Stay Interview Guide helps managers conduct interviews with current employees, enabling the manager to understand the employee's current engagement level, satisfaction with current role and responsibilities, suggestions for potential improvements, and intent to stay with the organization.

Stay Interview Guide

4. IT Retention Solutions Catalog – Use this catalog to select and prioritize retention solutions across the employee lifecycle.

Review best-practice solutions to identify those that are most suitable to your organizational culture and employee needs. Use the IT Retention Solutions Catalog to explore a variety of methods to improve retention, understand their use cases, and determine stakeholder responsibilities.

IT Retention Solutions Catalog

Workshop: Tactics to Retain IT Talent

Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

Module 1: Identify Reasons for Regrettable Turnover

The Purpose

Identify the main drivers of turnover at the organization.

Key Benefits Achieved

Find out what to explore during focus groups.

Activities

Outputs

1.1

Review data to determine why employees join, stay, and leave.

  • List of common themes/pain points recorded in the Retention Plan Workbook.
1.2

Identify common themes.

1.3

Prepare for focus groups.

Module 2: Conduct Focus Groups

The Purpose

Conduct focus groups to explore retention drivers.

Key Benefits Achieved

Explore identified themes.

Activities

Outputs

2.1

Conduct four 1-hour focus groups with the employee segment(s) identified in the pre-workshop activities.

  • Focus group feedback.
2.2

Info-Tech facilitators independently analyze results of focus groups and group results by theme.

  • Focus group feedback analyzed and organized by themes.

Module 3: Identify Needs and Retention Initiatives

The Purpose

Home in on employee needs that are a priority.

Key Benefits Achieved

A list of initiatives to address the identified needs

Activities

Outputs

3.1

Create an empathy map to identify needs.

  • Employee needs and shortlist of initiatives to address them.
3.2

Shortlist retention initiatives.

Module 4: Prepare to Communicate and Launch

The Purpose

Prepare to launch your retention initiatives.

Key Benefits Achieved

A clear action plan for implementing your retention initiatives.

Activities

Outputs

4.1

Select retention initiatives.

  • Finalized list of retention initiatives.
4.2

Determine goals and metrics.

  • Goals and associated metrics recorded in the Retention Plan Workbook.
4.3

Plan stakeholder communication.

4.4

Build a high-level action plan.

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Tactics to Retain IT Talent

Keep talent from walking out the door by discovering and addressing moments that matter and turnover triggers.

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

Many organizations are facing an increase in voluntary turnover as low unemployment, a lack of skilled labor, and a rise in the number of vacant roles have given employees more employment choices.

Common Obstacles

Regrettable turnover is impacting organizational productivity and leading to significant costs associated with employee departures and the recruitment required to replace them.

Many organizations tackle retention from an engagement perspective: Increase engagement to improve retention. This approach doesn't consider the whole problem.

Info-Tech's Approach

Build the case for creating retention plans by leveraging employee data and feedback to identify the key reasons for turnover that need to be addressed.

Target employee segments and work with management to develop solutions to retain top talent.

Info-Tech Insight

Engagement surveys mask the volatility of the employee experience and hide the reason why individual employees leave. You must also talk to employees to understand the moments that matter and engage managers to understand turnover triggers.

This research addresses regrettable turnover

This is an image of a flow chart with three levels. The top level has only one box, labeled Turnover. the Second level has 2 boxes, labeled Voluntary, and Involuntary. The third level has two boxes under Voluntary, labeled Non-regrettable: The loss of employees that the organization did not wish to keep, e.g. low performers, and Regrettable: The loss of employees that the organization wishes it could have kept.

Low unemployment and rising voluntary turnover makes it critical to focus on retention

As the economy continues to recover from the pandemic, unemployment continues to trend downward even with a looming recession. This leaves more job openings vacant, making it easier for employees to job hop.

This image contains a graph of the US Employment rate between 2020 - 2022 from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis and Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 2022, the percentage of individuals who change jobs every one to five years from 2022 Job Seeker Nation Study, Jobvite, 2022, and voluntary turnover rates from BLS, 2022

With more employees voluntarily choosing to leave jobs, it is more important than ever for organizations to identify key employees they want to retain and put plans in place to keep them.

Retention is a challenge for many organizations

The number of HR professionals citing retention/turnover as a top workforce management challenge is increasing, and it is now the second highest recruiting priority ("2020 Recruiter Nation Survey," Jobvite, 2020).

65% of employees believe they can find a better position elsewhere (Legaljobs, 2021). This is a challenge for organizations in that they need to find ways to ensure employees want to stay at the organization or they will lose them, which results in high turnover costs.

Executives and IT are making retention and turnover – two sides of the same coin – a priority because they cost organizations money.

  • 87% of HR professionals cited retention/turnover as a critical and high priority for the next few years (TINYpulse, 2020).
  • $630B The cost of voluntary turnover in the US (Work Institute, 2020).
  • 66% of organizations consider employee retention to be important or very important to an organization (PayScale, 2019).
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About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

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Author

Nick Kozlo

Contributors

  • Gregory P. Smith, CEO, Chart Your Course
  • Dr. Iris Ware, Chief Learning Officer, City of Detroit
  • Jane Moughon, Specialist in increasing profits, reducing turnover and maximizing human potential in manufacturing companies
  • Linda Goldblatt, Independent Consultant
  • Lisa Kaste, Former HR Director, Citco
  • Michael McGuire, Talent Management and Senior HRBP Lead, Shopify
  • Phillip Kotanidis, CHRO, Michael Garron Hospital
  • Piyush Mathur, Head of Workforce Analytics, Johnson & Johnson
  • Richard P. Finnegan, CEO, C-Suite Analytics
  • Thomas W. Lee, Professor of Management, University of Washington

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