Looking for a job? The odds are good that you are. According to a March study by Achievers, 52% (FIFTY TWO PERCENT!) said they were going to look for a new job in 2021. This should scare the $*&% out of employers everywhere. This has implications for every department of organizations everywhere, including IT. So, what can IT do? Well, here are a few thoughts.
- Tools
What tools do you provide to your employees to connect to other employees, customers, vendors, etc.? If management is intentional about your company culture and how it grows in the age of COVID and beyond, then IT needs to be intentional on how to execute this.
- Adoption of tools
IF tech professionals have implemented these communication tools, what is the adoption rate of those tools? Tools are only as good as the internal adoption rate. IT needs to create a plan for the adoption of these tools and ongoing measurement of utilization. Upper management needs to encourage the adoption of these tools as instruments to be used for the propagation of their culture.
- Hire anywhere
With work-from-home/work-from-anywhere taking off, employers can look to hire employees that may never set foot inside of a company’s facilities. These new employees may be in locales that require a lower cost of living, hence the cost of hiring these employees may be less. With these employees a county, state, or even a country away, how can they stay engaged? Learn culture? Connect with other employees? Maximize productivity? Encourage your internal purse strings holder to shift spend to tools if there’s money to be saved by hiring from anywhere.
- Engagement-ware
I know this sounds big brother-ish, but does management want to gauge productivity and monitor worktime vs. break/off-time? Are your employees' crushing waves of zombies in Call of Duty or taking care of customer issues? Are employees’ productivity and engagement trending in a bad direction and need to be coached up or coached out?
One piece of advice for IT professionals – sit down with management, understand what the culture at your company consists of and how employee productivity should be evaluated, put a technology plan in place to help execute on these plans, and then call C3 when you realize you may not have the tools in place (shameless horrible plug).
