Archive for July, 2008

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IT Workers Believe That The End Of The World Is Coming (Soon)

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

Why do IT workers have a negative outlook despite increases in IT hiring?

The Wall Street Journal Tech Blog is reporting that the folks over at Technisource Inc. have gone and released the results of a survey on how IT folks feel about their jobs based on talking to about 450 IT staffers. In a nutshell, nobody’s very happy right now.

Right now the U.S. economy is in the dumps, gas costs $4.00+ / gallon, milk costs $5.00 / gallon, and let’s not even get started talking about electricity and home fuel oil costs. However, IT employment is one of the few rays of sunshine in an otherwise gloomy picture. In fact, IT hiring is up about 10%. Yea! What’s so damming is that despite this good news, the survey reveals that IT folks are overwhelmingly negative about our prospects. Clearly we are looking at this as a “… glass half empty…” situation.

But wait, there’s more bad news! Here’s some other doom-and-gloom results from the survey:

  • 70% – said that the economy will get weaker
  • 59% – said that fewer jobs are available (not true by the way – tech hiring is up)
  • 20% – don’t believe that they could find another job
  • 17% – doubtful about the future of their employer

Ok, so now that everyone is thoroughly depressed, maybe we should ask ourselves why there is this apparent disconnect between what IT staff is thinking and reality? Is it that so many IT workers don’t feel that they have the perfect IT job? I don’t think so. Instead, I think that there are at least two reasons (and probably a bunch more). One is that within companies IT staffers are seeing a constant stream of “… we must find more ways to cut IT costs …” emails, programs, and words rolling down from leadership mountain. We all know that this generally leads to headcount reductions and so we await the inevitable chopping to begin.

Additionally, the median salary for IT workers has dropped to $73k in 2008. It was at $74k just last year. It’s not that big of a drop; however, what is much more worrying is that this is the first time that its dropped. It sure doesn’t look like anyone is going to be getting a big raise this year.

To wrap this gloom-fest up, let’s tackle one last question: what’s an IT manager to do? Let’s assume for a moment that you don’t have access to a pot of cash that you can use to boost everyone’s salary. Let’s also assume that you can’t guarantee everyone that their jobs are safe from the chopping block. Do you sorta feel like both of your hands are tied behind your back? Here are three simple steps that you can take to boost team morale and help everyone to become more productive:

  1. Change the focus from the short term to the long term: the depressing news is in the paper (or online) every morning. Change your team’s focus and get them to take a long term view. Have them anticipate how they will feel when the milestone is reached, the project is done, the users start to send their thanks back to the team.
  2. Work On Self Improvement For Each Team Member: You can’t guarantee everyone a job for life, so start to put some life into their job. Specifically, make sure that everyone has an assignment that stretches their abilities and makes them do something that they haven’t done before. Additionally, work out a skill training plan for each team member. You can’t control the future; however, you can help them make sure that they have the strongest resume possible.
  3. Strengthen The Team: Provide every team member with the ability to perform some task that makes the team stronger. Although you may not be able to cheer up each and every team member, if they start viewing their work as supporting the team, then all of a sudden their level of commitment will shoot up.

I’d just like to leave you with a few words from one of my favorite Broadway musicals, Annie:

The sun’ll come out
Tomorrow
Bet your bottom dollar
That tomorrow
There’ll be sun

Just thinkin’ about
Tomorrow
Clears away the cobwebs,
And the sorrow
‘Til there’s none

When I’m stuck with a day
That’s gray,
And lonely,
I just stick out my chin
And grin,
And say,
Oh

The sun’ll come out
Tomorrow
So ya gotta hang on
‘Til tomorrow
Come what may

Tomorrow
Tomorrow
I love ya
Tomorrow

You’re always
A day away

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Posted in employee motivation, it career, jobs, motivation | 14 Comments »

What Makes A Job The Perfect IT Job?

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

The perfect IT job comes with challenges and acknowledgments

Sorry in advance for going off on a bit of a rant here, but I’ve become fed up with both IT workers and managers who continue to completely miss the boat when it comes to creating, working, and managing exciting and fulfilling IT jobs.

This time my trigger was going out to lunch with a group of my friends who have gotten themselves roped into running one of those internal “High Achiever” IT management programs. You know the type: your boss identifies you as having management potential and so you get picked to attend a weekly/monthly class where they teach you about teamwork and, perhaps, introduce you to other parts of the company. This particular program selects the team to run next year’s program from the students who are participating in this year’s program. My friends had participated in last year’s program and were now complaining about how much of their time running this year’s program was taking up and that they didn’t feel that they were getting anything out of it.

I didn’t actually reach across the lunch table and grab them by their shirt collars; however, I was sorely tempted to do so. My frustration with them came from the simple fact that they were not taking the time to notice that they had been given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I asked them how many management training courses their company had sent them to. The answer was, of course, none. I then proceeded to point out to them that what they were doing as a part of running this training course was basically real-world practice for becoming IT directors, executive directors, VPs, etc. The challenge was that none of the students in the class worked for them. This meant that they couldn’t get things done by telling people what to do (managing), instead they were going to have to convince folks to do what they wanted them to do (leadership). This was where the real learning for them was going to take place!

At the end of our lunch, my friends were reinvigorated and pumped up about what they now had to accomplish. Their job had not changed one bit, but the way that they looked at their job had undergone a complete transformation. At the end of the day this is the key to making any IT job a success: you have to clearly identify the challenges that it will be required to solve and the acknowledgments that will be given for solving those challenges. This is exactly what IT staffers are looking for in a job and they will stay if they find it and move on if they don’t.

What really got my goat was trying to understand where were my friends’ managers in all of this? Instead of having to go out to lunch with me to get re-focused and re-energized, their managers should have been doing this on an almost daily basis. Once again it appears as though IT managers have allowed themselves to get too focused on project schedules, code delivery, and server configurations and have missed the key role of IT management: creating challenges and providing acknowledgments. How good of a job are you doing at this?

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Posted in employee motivation, IT jobs, IT staff, retention, self motivation | 6 Comments »

Work + Personal Life = Super Creativity On Projects

Friday, July 25th, 2008

Tap into IT employee outside interests to boost workplace creativity

Amazingly enough, everyone on our teams has a world outside of work. If you can find a way to leverage the skills and talents that your team have developed “out there” then you just may have found a gusher of creativity that will propel your team to success and improve employee morale and boost retention.

Simona Covel over at the Wall Street Journal ran a story this week about Chris Wallace at SuperGroup Creative Omnimedia Inc. (try saying that three times real fast). What’s interesting about the Web site design company that Chris has set up is that in the early days he didn’t always have enough customer work to keep his staff busy. Chris did something unusual: he allowed his staff to work on their own projects, on the clock, during downtime. His initial motivation was that he didn’t want to lose his staff just because there was nothing for them to work on right then. The unexpected side benefit was that the personal photography, video, music, etc. skills of his employees spilled over into the ideas that they pitched to their customers. Chris reports that some presentations to customers contained upwards of 40% of work created by his employees during their downtime.

Now we don’t all have the luxury of working for a cutting edge media company like Chris’. I don’t know about your company; however, many of the companies that I’ve worked for would have a hard time paying for their employees to do non customer (internal or external) work. However, perhaps there is a middle ground here. Simply being aware of your teammates outside interests is the first step in being able to tap into their unknown skills. If you know what they can do, then you are well situated to be able to turn to them when the need arises and ask them if they can contribute a solution.

IT is not known for its need for artistic creativity on the job (media companies aside). However, we do have IT parties, we do create documentation, and our apps do have splash screens and use sounds. All of these open the door to taping into home grown creativity. The biggest payoff is that the more that your team is able to put of themselves into the product that they are working on, the greater their job satisfaction will be and the higher your overall retention will remain.

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Posted in creativity, downtime, morale, personal, retention | 1 Comment »

"You’re Fired!" (How To Let People Go With Class)

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

How IT managers can fire people with class

Ouch! one of the worst parts about being an IT manager is when it comes time to fire someone. It really doesn’t matter if the person truly deserves it or this is one of those “cut 10% from every department” exercises. Handling the situation where staff decides to leave by themselves is hard enough, this just makes a manager’s life that much more complicated. Some companies have training for their IT managers on how to handle this part of their job correctly; however, most just leave it up to the individual managers to learn how to do it over time.

If we can agree that there is no easy way to turn somebody that you work with’s life upside down, then at least we can take a moment and talk about a few guidelines for how you can terminate people with some measure of class for both you and them.

  • Best Time To Fire Someone: hands down it’s best done at the end of the day. Most often the person is going to be in shock and will need time alone to deal with what has just happened to them. Going home is better than sitting around at work. Additionally, if they need to clean out their desk, then they don’t have to put up with EVERYONE dropping by to tell them how sorry they are for them / glad that it wasn’t them.

  • Have A Good Reason For The Firing: Being fired is hard enough for IT professionals, but not being given a reason for your termination seems to make it 10x worse. A weak excuse like “I was told to fire you” or something like that is no better having no good reason.
  • Do The Firing Face-To-Face: The IT industry is full of really bad ways to fire people using technology. Bad examples include leaving voicemails telling people that they’ve been let go and sending termination notices out via email. As much as it hurts to deliver this news in person, it is really the right way to do it.

One of the best ways of thinking about why it’s important to do a good job of firing people was said by Bob Wilson who is the Chief Human Resources Officer for Elliott Davis: “We never want to lose sight of the fact that the person is forever an alumni.” Amen to that brother.

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Posted in attrition, downsizing, firing, job loss, rightsizing, termination | 3 Comments »

Employee Motivation: What To Do When You Feel Passed Over

Thursday, July 17th, 2008

Employee Motivation is based on being recognized for our work

I recently had a chance to talk with a friend of mine who works as a developer in the information technology department for a major telecommunications firm. I was surprised to discover that he was very angry and was thinking about quitting his job. It turns out that he had just completed a major project. He and two others had put in those non-stop 60-70 hour days. He had been away from home for the better part of two months and he was very proud of what was finally produced.

However, what had gotten him angry was that two other individuals had joined the project late in the game, had not worked nearly as hard as the core group of three had, and in the end they not only got credit for the project’s success, but they also got promotions while the core group of three were not promoted. Is is any wonder that my friend was so angry?

We spend a lot of time recruiting the best information technology employees and then we spend at least as much time worrying about employee motivation all too often only to end up with angry, bitter staff. In the case of my friend, what had gone wrong was instantly clear to me because I’ve done it to myself countless time. I call this situation, the “engineering field of dreams” problem.

Jobs in Information Technology allow us to focus on building things using only our minds and hands (for typing). As engineers we have a bad habit of completely focusing on solving the technical problem that we’ve been assigned and not lifting our heads up until we have a finished product. The problem with this is that we then expect the rest of the world to look at what we’ve made and realize what a great worker we are. In my case, I blame my Mom because whenever I took something that I had made to her she always reacted with joy and surprise and told me that it was the best thing that she had ever seen. Unfortunately, the rest of the world doesn’t work that way.

So what should my friend have done? While he was working on the project he should have realized that he had another job to do at the same time. In IT management speak we’d call this an “overlay job”. Every single day he needed to be managing his career — thinking about what he needed to be doing in order to get recognized for what he was doing and get considered for a promotion the next time an opening showed up. You know what he said when I told him this: “Hey Jim, I just don’t like to brag about myself!” Two quick replies to that: (1) if you don’t, then who do you think will? and (2) bragging would be bad, informing others would be good.

I ended up having a very long talk with my friend; however, here is the gist of what we talked about. He needs to identify who he needs to make aware of his contributions (his boss, his bosses boss, and the bosses of any department that his project interfaces with). He needs to communicate with these people regularly (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday). Communicating does not mean sending them mindless status reports. He needs to send brief, concise emails that provide valuable information such as “We had a problem, but here is how we solved it…” When he sends an email to these important people, he needs to address it to only them — don’t CC them or send it to a distro list. One-to-one sends a powerful message. Finally, he needs to do more than just send emails: he needs face time with the decision makers. I suggested that he use the excuse of “checking to make sure that you agree with the decisions that we’ve made” line to set up a meeting.

So remember: you are in charge of your career and nobody else. As technical professionals we all suffer from a “love my work, love me” syndrome and we need to do a better job of communicating with those in charge in order to move our career along.

Posted in career, communication, field of dreams, motivation | 4 Comments »

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