Archive for the ‘staffing’ Category

How Do You Prevent A Staffing Disaster Before It Happens?

Thursday, March 4th, 2010
Image Credit If You Are Prepared, Then You’ll Be Able To Prevent An Accident

If You Are Prepared, Then You’ll Be Able To Prevent An Accident

The Coming Disaster In Your IT Department

What do you think the mood of your IT team is right now? Poor? Downright bad? If your workplace is like most businesses out there right now, your team is still reeling from all of the layoffs, hiring freezes, pay cuts, etc. If nothing else, there has been a lingering sense of dread that has been in the air for the better part of two years. What do you need to be doing?

The Scope Of The Problem

There’s nothing physically wrong with your team, they are just really, really stressed out. What this means is that their creativity and productivity are probably at all time lows. You’re going to need to step in and do something about this situation.

I can almost hear you now: “I just don’t have time to do this right now.” Well guess what, you had better start to find the time. Otherwise you are going to find yourself buried in a wave of interviews as you try to fill all of the open positions in your department when everyone leaves.

The Conference Board has done a survey of 5,000 U.S. households (your team may not have been part of the survey, but the results probably still apply) and the results showed that only 45% were currently happy with their jobs. You’ve got a problem on you hands.

Steps You Can Take Now To Avoid Problems Later

You’ve got no budget, you’ve got no open req’s, what’s an IT manager to do when you need to cheer up your team? The good news is that there are a lot of low-cost, no-cost things that you can do that will save you much grief later on:

  • Job Titles: What are the titles of your staff? They are probably pretty boring. One thing that you can do that costs no money is to look into upgrading their titles – titles only, no promotions. Yes, you’d have to work with HR to do this, but the joy of going from “Systems Engineer IV” to “Senior Systems Engineer” can be absolutely amazing.
  • Work Time Options: Is your current team working a forced 9-5 work day? Loosing up on this can be a great no-cost way to pump some life back into the department. Yes, the work still needs to be done and yes, the company still needs to get value for the paycheck that it’s handing out; however, allowing your staff to determine when they work (including both nights and weekends) can go a long way to boosting morale and productivity. A nice side benefit of doing this is that it creates an almost entrepreneurial feeling and all of a sudden everyone becomes more willing to help each other out.
  • Bonuses: Remember when people used to get raises that were more than the cost of living? Well even though those days seem to long gone, one thing that you can do is to talk with HR and get your hands on some bonus money. Once you’ve got it, set up a bonus incentive program and just watch how everyone suddenly becomes motivated.
  • 1-on-1 Meetings: This may be the simplest of all the things that you could do – start taking the time to listen. Set up a time once a week where you’ll turn off the phone and the Instant Messaging and just talk with each staff member individually. This is a great chance for them to blow off steam, share their great new idea, or just have a chat with you. It doesn’t have to be too long – 15 minutes will do just fine.

What All Of This Means For You

As the global economy starts to improve, you as an IT Leader are going to have to start taking steps to make your beaten down staff feel special once again. If you don’t do this, then when the job market picks up, they are going to leave you.

Many of the most effective things that you can do involve low-cost or no-cost actions. Things like changing job titles, becoming more flexible with work times, or even just taking the time to listen better would all have positive results.

No matter what you decide to do, make sure that you do something. There is nothing more important for you to be spending your time on than making sure that your talented and experienced staff stay on board with you.

Question For You: In your company, what would the easiest thing be for you to do in order to boost your team’s morale?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

In the life of an IT Leader, there will come the day that you find yourself in a new position. You might be working for the same company and just be in a different role or you might be starting a new job – no matter, the challenge is the same. Where do you start? It turns out that doing nothing right off the bat might be the right idea…

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Tomorrow’s IT Managers Can Be Found Locally

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

IT Leaders Know That Solving Staffing Issues Starts At The Local Level <p><div xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" about="http://www.flickr.com/photos/somewhatfrank/3508260479/"><a rel="cc:attributionURL" href=Even in tough economic times, IT Leaders are still concerned about losing talent. Studies are showing that we are losing our IT Leaders at a much faster rate than new ones are being produced. On top of this, up to 30 million managers and leaders are going to become eligible to retire in the next five years. How can an IT Leader help to replace these leaders?

Defining The Problem

The loss of leaders in the IT field means that executive recruiters end up having to move thousands of managers not only cross-country but all between industries each year. This challenge has been complicated by what firms have been doing for the past few years.

In order to become leaner and reduce their operating costs, many firms have been removing layers of IT management. These tactics were a good idea when lean and nimble competition was showing up and taking business away from established firms. However, there has been a cost.

Those layers of IT management that have been removed used to provide development opportunities and ways for the next generation of IT leaders to grow. This has resulted in a situation where as the current crop of IT leaders get ready to roll off into retirement, there aren’t enough replacement candidates waiting to take their place.

Solutions Start Locally

The key to solving this IT department staffing crisis is for IT Leaders to sit down with their HR departments and establish good hiring practices in their local branches. These practices need to create a good flow of diverse talent.

The goal must to be find ways to recruit and grow employees at the local level. Once this is done, then the future leaders can be fed into the company’s core operations and this will provide a way to not only fill higher level positions but also solve the challenge of creating a diverse workforce.

Final Thoughts

Since we work in IT, we always look for a way to solve our problems using IT tools. Ensuring a steady flow of IT Leaders can be accomplished by creating an automated tracking system to identify those candidates who posses both the skills and the experience to handle new opportunities when they open up.

This type of system allows the firm to fill open IT positions much faster and with better suited candidates. If you can find a way to help your firm accomplish this, then you will have found a way to transform yourself from an IT manager into a true leader.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

With the critical importance of IT solutions to existing company operations and increasing global competition, it’s possible that firms need IT workers more than IT workers need the firm. What’s an IT leader to do?

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Staffing Diversity Challenges IT Leaders

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

IT Leaders Need To Manage Diversity In Their Teams<br><div xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" about="http://www.flickr.com/photos/clevercupcakes/2980544017/"><a rel="cc:attributionURL" href=They say that the world is becoming a smaller place – I think that they just might be right. IT Leaders are starting to realize that coming up with ways to staff their teams so that they are diverse is quickly moving from being a political nicety to now becoming a business necessity. Does anyone have any suggestions on how best to go about doing this?

The Problem

Most IT departments are no longer single site operations. In fact, with the growth of outsourcing a single IT department may now have offices in multiple countries: China, India, Russia, etc. This type of distributed operation is a great way to ensure that more work gets done at a lower price; however, it also poses a significant staffing challenge for IT Leaders.

It’s all too easy to think that we can take a few high-performing IT Leaders from the U.S., plunk them down in one of our remote offices and have them be a an effective leader. The reality is that all too often, this doesn’t work. If you haven’t groomed someone on your team to step in and run / interface with a remote office, then they aren’t going to be able to do it.

In the U.S., IT managers are encouraged to use frank talk and direct confrontation in order to deal with team issues. However, especially when dealing with teams in Asis, this can come across as being rude and offensive.

What’s An IT Leader To Do?

The trick to solving IT staffing challenges for remote offices or just to deal with remote offices is to create what the experts call a “talent plan“. Doing this will allow you to provide unique levels of value to your remote IT offices.

The first part of a talent plan is to identify what positions on your team you are going to have to fill and what types of cultural skills those  positions are going to require. It’s important to note that it’s not always necessary to hire a person of a given nationality in order to deal smoothly with a remote office that has other staff members of that nationality. Finding someone who is sensitive to that nationality and who has dealt with them before can fill this need.

Filling a position to manage a remote office should not be a sudden effort. IT Leaders realize that every position will eventually need to be filled because the person in that spot now will be promoted, let go, or will move on. A key part of any talent plan is to early on identify who the potential replacements are. This allows an IT Leader to take the time to make sure that the potentials get an opportunity to get trained in both the skills and the corporate values that they will need if they fill the position.

Final Thoughts

Staffing mistakes can be very expensive and picking the wrong person to lead a remote IT office or to interface with such an office can flat out be disastrous. IT Leaders realize that if they wait until the last minute when an position suddenly has to be filled, then it will be too late to do it correctly.

Instead, if they take the time to create a talent plan then their investment of upfront time and effort into grooming the right replacements will ensure that the correct staffing decisions are made. Learning to add diversity management to your IT team will mean that you will have found a way to transform yourself from an IT manager into a true leader.

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Even in tough economic times, IT Leaders are still concerned about losing talent. Studies are showing that we are losing our IT Leaders at a much faster rate than new ones are being produced. On top of this, up to 30 million managers and leaders are going to become eligible to retire in the next five years. How can an IT Leader help to replace these leaders?

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Staffing Flexibility Is Soooo Underrated!

Monday, August 18th, 2008

Flexibility is needed in order to ensure that you will be able to staff your IT department

If you thought that just barely getting by using skills to manage your IT staffing needs using both home grown talent as well as warm bodies that you purchased off the street was tough, just imagine how challenging it is when you try to move things up one level and adapt your IT organization to the uncertainty in demand for IT talent. Just think about that for a moment: how would your life be different if instead of running around trying to fill holes in your organization as they occur, you could actually be ahead of the 8-ball and be ready for changes as they came?

Here’s a fundamental thought that will help you to solve this staffing problem once and for all. It’s based on lessons that our supply chain friends learned the hard way a long time ago. Instead of trying to stock your IT department with every body that you think that you might need both today and for the next x number of years, instead do what the supply chain guys do. Bring in small batches of what you need more often. This will allow you to not have to attempt to predict your staffing needs so very far out.

For a good example of how the current IT hiring/staffing process is broken, take a look at how recent college graduates are brought into the organization. Most firms do almost all of their new graduate hiring right after the students get out of college. This means there is a wave of new recruits that enter the firm in June. Even if you allow for some new-hire orientation and perhaps some training, the firm still has a need to carve out a substantial number of new-hire spots all at once. If the company is struggling in the current quarter, then this can be especially difficult.

A different way to handle this issue would be to take this single large problem and divide it into two smaller parts. Not all college graduates really want to go to work immediately after finishing 4, 5, or 6 years of intense schooling. Some would more than willing to delay their start date by 3-6 months. If this was done, then the firm would only have to process half as many new recruits at a time. More personal attention could be paid to each incoming employee and better fits for talents and interests could be made. Having fewer number of new hires to place but having them more often makes the staffing challenge much easier – you never have too many or too few. Retaining non-working students for 3-6 months can be as simple as agreeing to pay them 1/2 salary until they start working full time.

Long and expensive training programs present the same challenge. A two year management training program could be broken up into four 6 month programs. Each smaller program could have its own goals and forecasts. The benefit of doing training this way is that should an employee in training decide to leave the firm, then the entire training program expense may not have been spent on them.

Finally, within IT organizations different programs are often allowed to maintain and run their own talent management programs. The end result of this is that all too often, one program will have too many potential managers and another will have too few. Since there is no centralized way to communicate these supply issues, the firm generally just deals badly with the imbalance. If talent management within the IT department was centralized, then this issue would not occur.

So now we have an understanding of where to find IT talent and we now know how to deal with fluctuation in the need for IT talent, I guess the next thing that we should talk about would be how to improve the Return on Investment spent on developing employees…

How does IT staffing work at your firm? Do you seem to have waves of new employees sweep in every so often? Is your department set up to handle this flood of talent? Have you ever tried to manage the process by adding fewer new employees more often? What was the result? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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