Retaining tech talent

Avatar of Tim Meaney Tim Meaney, SVP Software

I was recently a guest on the Postlight Podcast talking about retaining technical talent. While the difficulty of filling the many open technical positions at most companies is widely known and discussed, retention is often overlooked. And maximizing the length of stay for the members of your technical team is the key to maximizing delivery—seasoned team members ship code. And churn is a cascading setback.

I shared what I view as the four key elements that drive retention that you should be actively considering if you‘re in a leadership position on a technical team:

  1. Connectedness. Ensure a connection for each team member—to the company, to the strategy, to their manager, to their work, and especially to their team.
  2. Agency. Cultivate the voice for tech talent—for their work, their career progression, their tooling, and the processes used by the team. And listen to this voice.
  3. Growth. Ensure your technical team members have opportunities to grow and the support to make that happen.
  4. Modernity. Top tech talent wants to work on modern tech with modern processes and practices and be able to be current with the goings on in their discipline as well as industry. Is yours modern?