The motivator

Stories of salaries and perks received by IT staff in other sectors will not help you to keep your staff either. The City is beginning to flex its recruitment muscles, and tall tales of massive salary increases are doing the rounds again. Part of the problem for heads of IT is stimulating the HR department. For a long time the IT job market has been relatively flat, with employees prepared to sit tight, even if they weren’t particularly enjoying their job. That has changed, so firms need to look at ways of engaging and keeping their most effective staff.

One of the best ways to do this is not through pay rises, but through motivation and improving job satisfaction. In last year’s Harvey Nash CIO Salary Survey job satisfaction came out as one of the most important factors in changing roles, illustrating how important motivation is to keeping a happy productive workforce.

More recently Accenture carried out a survey that found job seekers don’t place as much value on fashionable job attributes like corporate citizenship and diversity, as they do on traditional benefits like good rewards and personal growth opportunities. In fact challenging and interesting work is the most important characteristic – selected by 60 per cent, with potential for recognition and reward for their accomplishments a close second with 58 per cent.

So if your team has returned from their summer break demotivated, and lacklustre you may need to take steps to increase their job satisfaction, before they begin to look for a different job. It may be enough to expand their roles and responsibilities, and to look for new ways of challenging them. After a couple of years of not having to try too hard to keep staff, getting the HR department involved with providing incentive programmes or bonus schemes may be an effective way of heading off any potential retention problems.

It may also be time to reappraise your own management techniques. Have a look at the way in which you are managing the team, and see what you can do to improve job satisfaction for your staff. It is clear from research that both CIOs and their staff are motivated by a challenge, so it makes sense to try to increase the challenges available for staff, and wherever necessary to expand roles. This doesn’t mean expanding the work they do, which will have the opposite effect, but adding to responsibility and interest in their work.

If that isn’t possible, it may be useful to consider team building and motivational sessions. Research into employee motivation carried out back in the 1930s, found that the very fact that you are paying more attention to your team could pay dividends in productivity and effectiveness. The research, which later became called the Hawthorne Effect, proved that employees are highly motivated by emotional factors, like getting attention, being included and in sharing responsibility as well as improved benefits and salaries. In the Hawthorne Effect experiment, even those workers in the control group who weren’t actively involved in the research improved their productivity and felt more motivated, just because they felt that someone was taking an interest.

IT Directors are constantly being told that communication is a key skill. But they need to make sure they are communicating with their team to motivate them, as well as the management board, and their users, if they are to avoid having to spend valuable time trying to replace good staff who feel undervalued and de-motivated.