Improving Employee Retention Through Modernization
If you want your good employees to leave the company, here are some tips that will encourage them to seek employment elsewhere:
- Make them use outdated, inefficient, buggy software.
- Prevent them from enhancing their skills, growing in their careers, and keeping up with the times.
- Saddle them with unnecessary and wasteful business processes.
- Don’t listen to their job-related pain points and ideas for improvement.
“But wait,” you’re saying. “I don’t want to get rid of my good employees, I want to keep them. Recruiting, hiring, and training a new employee is expensive. I want to make staying here an easy choice for my existing staff.”
Really? Okay then—stop doing those things listed above and start doing things that will make them want to stay. Many of these things fall in the category of IT modernization.
IT Modernization and Employee Retention
How can IT modernization motivate employees to continue working for you? First, consider what high-performing employees want. They want adequate compensation, of course—who doesn’t? —but it’s not just about the salary and benefits. Some factors that drive a positive employee experience include, among others:
- Opportunities for career growth
- New challenges and new skills
- Knowing that their voices are heard and their ideas are taken seriously
An IT modernization project can provide all of this and more. How?
Process improvement: Before embarking on a modernization effort, look hard at your current business processes, optimizing them to reduce waste and eliminating processes that add no value. Your employees are a rich source of information to help with this because they live with these processes daily. They will appreciate having a say in how to improve them.
Project teamwork: In a similar vein, the employees who will use the end products of the modernization project should be kept involved throughout the project. They can help inform the requirements, evaluate prototypes, and test user acceptance. Keeping them involved gives them a sense of ownership and accountability for project success.
Skills enhancement: Your employees don’t want to feel stuck in a situation where their skills fall behind those of their peers at other businesses. If they are using outdated tools, they are not learning new things and will have a more challenging time finding new employment if they must. The opportunity to advance their skills with new tools will, somewhat ironically, make them more likely to stay.
As an extra bonus, these traits also make recruiting and hiring new talent easier. High performers don’t want to come into a situation that’s a step backward.
Solution Machine and IT Modernization
If you are planning or contemplating an IT modernization initiative, don’t overlook the employee-retention angle when enumerating the benefits in your project plan. And don’t simply pay lip service to the idea—make it a vital part of the project.
At Solution Machine, our IT modernization experts have helped numerous clients reap the benefits of successful modernization projects, including better employee retention. We attribute our success to our proven methodology that prioritizes process improvement and end-user engagement. Contact Solution Machine today to learn more.
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