How To Keep The Best Staffers
By Thomas Clancy, Jr., president, Valiant Technology
How to keep great teammates.
We’ve all had it happen, great people that we love to work with come in to your office with a nervous look on their face: “can I uh….can I talk to you for a second?”.
Here it comes. Welcome to dumpsville. Population: you. ARGH.
As much we all know it sucks to lose staff, I am consistently amazed at how little my peers do to retain their top performers. Churn and burnout is a huge problem in the MSP community. Go to the MSP or sysadmin “subreddits”, and many of the comments are related to burn out, work frustration, and folks seeking advice on how to change careers, change roles, change companies. What gives?
We, the owners of our firms MUST learn to listen to our people as carefully as we listen to our customers. Learn from the people we fire, and learn from the people that resign. Take a moment and think about it: Why did your last three staffers quit? Why did you fire those last three bums? Did you do ANYTHING to address the problem proactively? Did you announce the lesson learned and the steps you’re taking to the remaining staff members so they know you’re learning and listening? Proactive Managed Service Providers have to manage their teams too, and be proactive in improving their operations.
Interestingly, pay rate is NOT the primary factor in losing people (unless you are a chronic under payer, but those are rare and don’t survive long in my experience). Daniel Pink’s “Drive” is an amazing book that outlines the compensation issue in great detail. If you haven’t read it, you should. In brief, Pink states: It’s not about the money. It’s about fulfillment. It’s about role and responsibility, it’s about opportunity, chance to make things better. People want to maintain a decent standard of living of course, we cannot expect our techs to live in mud huts and root around in garbage cans for food, but we also don’t have to give everyone a Bentley as a signing bonus either.
I’ve kept a “Rogues Gallery” excel spreadsheet for years. It’s a list of all the staffers we’ve ever had, when they started, when they left, and why. While I haven’t been perfect at listening and learning, keeping this log has been helpful for me to look back on and reflect upon, when the mood strikes me or the opportunity to review it presents itself (typically when a new rogue is getting added to the gallery).
What have our primary sources of problems been?
We typically fire people for lack of commitment.
Showing up late. Not showing up at all. Not improving their skills or pursuing a new cert.
We typically LOSE people for one of two reasons:
A: because they’ve gotten too attractive for the big shops to ignore. (LinkedIn, Apple, Amazon, sexy new startups and Top 10 Ad Agencies have poached my best people). I know full well that we can’t do much to compete with Amazon, Apple, etc. Those big names are an irresistible addition to a resume for a tech.
B: because they cannot handle the pressure, feel like they’re on a hamster wheel and can’t establish a healthy work-life balance, because they are overworked, underappreciated and think the grass is greener across town (it isn’t of course).
Below are some tips that I’ve picked up on in the years of running my firm that help fight off the grass is greener loss-
Acknowledge hard work, when it happens.
If someone works a 15-hour day, covers a sick teammate’s shift, volunteers for a suicide mission, takes an ear beating from a customer- that is worthy of an “attaboy”. Make the “attaboy” public, and do it promptly. The longer the distance between the event and the reward, the less effective the impact. Do it the same day if at all possible. Following morning at worst. Gratitude only works if it’s timely.
Get beyond the “Gift Card Standard”.
If your only reward is cash or an Amazon gift card, you don’t know your team members. You’re not connected with your people. Hey look, 50 bucks is 50 bucks. It’s better than nothing of course, but it’s less emotionally effective than it could be. Is this champ of yours into wine? Videogames? Fishing? Find your teammate’s hobby/passion, and get them a gift card to (or a gadget/item from) a place that means something to them. The local bike shop, a local “date night” restaurant, comic book store, whatever they love, show them that you know them, that you care, and that you are grateful and that you know what they love.
Explain your goals, and tie the team to the goal too.
As owners, why do we come to work every day? For the paycheck? I hope not. We come to work because WE have a vision. A dream. A Big Hairy Audacious Goal (thanks Jim Collins). Does your team know what your BHAG is? Do they see where the company is on the breadcrumb trail you’ve laid out? Are you on target or off? if you’re on target, crow about it, and celebrate. A couple pizzas and a case of beer can work wonders as a spontaneous “thanks guys”. And when you’re OFF target, talk about that too. Ask the team what can be done to get back ON target. You WILL get some ideas. Some of them will suck. Some of them will be shockingly accurate (and painful). Some will be obvious. All need to be considered and addressed. This makes the team feel like they are connected to the success. We are troubleshooters. We love to fix broken things (especially when the broken thing is the company that signs our paycheck).
Keep your promises.
If you make a promise, honor it as best you can. This is pretty simple, but I have to admit I’ve got at least one significant entry on my rogue’s gallery that happened because I ignored the timeline I set for a staffer to advance. I blew it, but I learned. Of course, if we cannot honor a promise, (cash crunches happen, disasters happen), be open and honest about it, and adjust the expectation. We do it with our customers, shouldn’t we do it with our staff too?
Keep up with the times.
no one likes to work for the “old salt” that refuses to embrace new emerging technology. Remember, these people love technology. New technology is interesting, exciting, life changing. Yes, after 20+ years in the game, we all recognize a dopey gadget as a dopey gadget faster than most. But resist the temptation to pooh-pooh everything, because it can get depressing. Let them be excited puppies. Let them explore, play and try the latest and greatest. Who the heck wants to work for the last guy still holding on to a rotary phone? Does that seem like a shop that will help your career, or stall it?
Hold them to a high standard. and live up to it yourself.
I have found that the more I expect of people, the more I get, and the happier they are to provide it. I challenge my children this way, expecting them to make eye contact, order their dinner from the waiter, clean their place at the table, take out the trash and all that good “Leave It To Beaver” stuff. It works. My friends that “baby” their kids are always surprised that they’re stuck with babies! Duh! The same rules apply to team members. Tell them to come in on time. And mean it. Tell them to update every single ticket they’ve got open every single day. And demand that they do it. The catch (there’s always a catch) is that you have to live up to the same standard. You need to be there first and make the big pot of coffee. Or you have to be the last out the door and arm the alarm. You’ll need to track your work in tickets or a CRM or the financial system, just as they work in the PSA. And you have to be disciplined if you want them to respect rules of discipline. If you want them to have a clean workspace, don’t let your desk look like Hiroshima. If you want them dressed up for work, keep your ugly toes inside shoes and don’t show off your flip-flops.
CONCLUSION:
No matter the cause, losing a staff member always stinks. It means job ads, resume sorting, interviewing, kissing more frogs and praying you find princes looking for jobs. But if we put in a little effort at learning from our failures, improving our habits in increments, understanding the needs of the people that remain working with us, we can keep our churn to a minimum, and put our lips to better use: kissing prospects while praying for princes with deep pockets and a will to upgrade their entire infrastructure. Good luck.
About Thomas Clancy, Jr.
As Valiant’s President, Tom charts the course of the business, and ensures that the team loves the tribe they’ve joined. Tom is a frequent speaker at industry trade events, including Autotask’s Comm Live, Business Solutions magazine’s Channel Transitions events and others. Tom is proud to be one of the authors of three editions of the Mac OS X Bible, (so he can say he IS Tom Clancy the author).