Hamstaa!

The IT sector is heating back up again, and as such, salaries (at least in Australia) are increasing. With this increase however comes the challenge of retention of good staff. Most people see this as having to pay higher and higher salaries but I believe there are other options.

I was reading an article in a recent Campus Review entitled “Wellness & retention” which discussed some of these options.

Universities have traditionally not been the highest paid positions, so retention of good IT staff in this climate is becoming an increasing problem. The University of South Australia has tried a different approach to just competing on salaries. 

Over the past five years, its 100-strong IT team has been the focus of a wellness program aimed at encouraging employees and recruitment prospects to view the university as an employer of choice.

Some of the things that UniSA has undertaken are gym passes, weekly exercise programs, fresh fruit, fruit juices in summer, and soup in winter.

What they found was this focus on health of their staff resulted in a drop in attrition to 2%. It also had side benefits

The program costs about $15,000 a year but pays for itself with a reduction in sick days.

I believe there are a number of factors beyond just pure salary that influences a person’s decision to stay with a company. Things like culture, colleagues/team, stress, management and how much the company values them. 

At Ephox we’ve always had a great culture of fun. In addition, we have a great coffee machine, go to the pub on Friday’s for roast lunch and have beers at the end of the week.

Recently I asked the team what additional things we’d like to have in the office. I was looking for suggestions that meet one or more of the following criteria;

• Team Building
• Fun
• Health & Well Being

I got some interesting responses including fresh fruit, monthly neck/shoulder massages and quarterly team events. So we’ve started getting in fresh fruit, are about to trial in office massage and have nominated one of the team to be the coordinator for a team event.

I’d be really interested in what other companies are doing to retain great staff other than paying higher salaries.

So you’ve got talented people and as we all know, you need to invest in maintaining those skills. While there are a lot of ways you can do this, some of which are quite expensive, sometimes the little things have the biggest impact.

At Ephox we have a good collection of technical books and I’m always looking for new ones to add. It was suggested that we should get a copy of “Head First Design Patterns”. As the Head First series are designed to be written in, I purchased a copy for each member of the team. 

I was sure it was a good decision when the day after they arrived one of the team stopped me to tell me how good it was. This was quickly followed up by one of my senior engineers raving about how easy and compelling it was to read. Finally, one of the team rang me on the weekend prior to their week of leave to confirm they could write in the book, as they were really getting into it.

So, if you want a low cost form of training, don’t just buy books for your team library, but actually give them their own copies.

Andy recently pointed me at an interesting article, “The Paper Version of the Web” that shows some great examples of UI designs sketched on paper. In the article Sean collects together some of the publicly available UI sketches for well known websites like Flickr and Twitter.

At Ephox, we have quite a lot of UI design required and as such we’ve tried a few different things from quick Java mock-ups to Photoshopped images. To me however the best solution is the paper sketch. Why, well other than it being pretty cheap to develop and modify, anyone can do it, including the “client”. Finally, there’s also no chance you will be tempted to use the “prototype/mockup” as the basis for the final version.