Do you have a great IT team at your MSP business? If so, the odds are pretty good that you want to keep these good employees, right? Well, that’s not always as easy as you might think. The truth is employees aren’t as loyal as bosses often think, but there are some ways that you can improve your IT talent retention.
You might know that keeping a good IT team in place is more difficult than it might seem, especially when it comes to certain roles. There is a lot of competition out there for good IT technicians and they know that there could always be a better job for them right around the next corner. So, what’s an MSP to do? Here are some tips:
Create a Mentor/Mentee Environment
There is no denying that IT people are smart and modern individuals for the most part. So, they might not always like the idea of a boss/employee relationship. So, consider a different type of corporate culture for your MSP business. Pairing senior members of the team with those who don’t have as much experience does a couple of things.
First, for senior members, it helps them to feel as if they are part of the big picture in the company. In other words, it helps them to feel appreciated and needed. For the newer or more junior members of the team, they have someone that they can lean on when they have questions or need to bounce ideas off of. With this type of corporate environment, it is a win-win situation for everyone.
Create a Hands-On Corporate Culture
Think about this for a minute: do you think that the members of your IT team want to simply be told what to do and then do it? Or do they want to have a hands-on approach with all parts of a project? The second option is the one you want. When you allow all members of your IT team to be involved every step of the way, they feel much more involved in the business side of things, and they are much more apt to enjoy working. Again, they also feel needed and an employee who feels needed is one who stays with a business.
Create Salaries That Reflect Ongoing Training
The best IT people are those who are up to date on the ever-changing landscape of the IT world. So, these people constantly have to keep training if they want to keep up with technology. However, you can’t expect an IT person who is expanding their knowledge and skills to stick around for months and even years if you are still paying them a salary that reflects their skills before they went through the training. Work with your HR and accounting teams to create a fair compensation scale that reflects an IT employee’s training.
Create Camaraderie
Finally, you want to make sure that you are creating a business environment that promotes camaraderie among employees. IT people are often stuck behind computers or lost in a maze of servers, but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t have a sense of camaraderie with their fellow employees. Create opportunities for your staff to get to know each other better and to create and build relationships. For example, you can do this and give back to your local community by looking into volunteer opportunities that your IT team members can do together.
These are only a few of the ways that you can improve IT employee retention within your MSP business, but these suggestions work very well. The bottom line here is that you want to create an atmosphere that people want to be in.
