This article has a great opening quote. It says: “We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge”. It’s from John Naisbitt, who wrote the book, Megatrends in 1988. I think this quote can be very apropo in organizations as we have data, we have plenty of reports deriving information, but sometimes we don’t have a lot of knowledge, especially when there has been turnover in our staff.
We can train new people on many things, but not everything. The knowledge of the culture, of what others know, of the little strange bugs or behaviors that can’t get fixed, the tribal knowledge accumulated by living in an environment. These are the learnings that can’t easily be replaced, and until they are, often new employees are less productive.
Of course, sometimes new employees will view the world in a different light and find solutions others haven’t considered. That happens, but it’s more likely that they will make mistakes, break something, or just be less effective than their predecessors.
There are no shortage of articles, like the one above or this one, that discuss the concerns IT leadership has about employee turnover. Perhaps the leadership does see that as a problem, but often first level managers don’t. Often leadership doesn’t realize how poorly trained or effective first line managers are in working with their technical staffs. I sometimes think that the world in Dilbert is far too prevalent precisely because of very poor management skills. It certainly seems that efforts made to retain employees are relatively rare in many companies.
In my career, we’ve had some boom and bust times in the market for developers. There have been times where anyone with a certification or a hint of experience could get hired (or get a raise). There were other times when people were careful to hold onto their jobs because finding a new one could be hard.
I think employers should not only invest in their staffs, but work to train and upskill them, demand more from them over time, but treat them fairly with more than just a paycheck. The dividends from a hardware allowance, a training budget, and more can easily pay for themselves with better productivity and the lack of fees to recruiters. You should certainly hold staff accountable and responsible for getting work done, but make sure you also treat them fairly and support them.
That’s if you also spend time managing your managers and ensuring they balance the demands they make of employees with the support needed to ensure their staff performs well. If you ignore the managers, you might as well ignore the staff, set aside more recruiter fees in your budget, and hope for the best.
Steve Jones
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