Mobile and Competition In Silicon Valley

Mobile and Competition In Silicon Valley today is fierce. Silicon Valley's leading the technology hub leaving other cities left to catch up. According to Bloomberg, For every Hugo Barra leaving Google for China's Xiaomi, there's Sanjay Poonen jumping from Germany's SAP to VMware, London-based DeepMind getting bought by Google, and Israel's PrimeSense going to Apple. 22 tech execs in the U.S. each made more than $20 million in total compensation, according to 2013 proxy data compiled by Equilar, a research firm.

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Five Proactive Retention Strategies:

You can’t completely protect your organization from competing with other employers, but you can use proactive retention strategies so that employees are less inclined to entertain offers from other companies. Putting in the effort up front is worthwhile because it’s difficult to retain employees once they’ve begun to seek employment elsewhere, even with additional compensation or advancement opportunities. “When companies react to a person leaving, they often cannot change the really important reasons why the person is leaving, irrespective of the amount of money they throw at him,” says Hufford.

#1: Make sure it’s a match — Tech professionals have a slightly different motivation from other employees, says Herb Gosewisch, partner at U.S. Alliance Partners, a consultancy focused on employee engagement and sustainability practices. “They have more loyalty to their career and personal development than the company that employs them,” he says. “IT workers tend to stay longer and find more satisfaction when they feel they can ‘own’ their work and it’s something they influence from a creative point of view.”

So the stronger the match between the job requirements and the employee’s skills, goals and values, the more likely it is that the employee will want to stay. “Focus on a key individual and make sure that the projects they’re working on allow them to continue to develop their skill set,” says Silver.

#2: Start strong — Retention efforts should begin during onboarding. “All the recent studies suggest that new employees determine within the first few months of employment whether or not they made a good decision,” says Gosewisch. Engaging new employees in the company culture and business infrastructure from day one will improve employees’ experiences and prospects for staying.

#3: Reduce burnout — In today’s fast-paced IT work environments, stress levels and burnout can run high and lead to employee turnover. Evaluate your project management and organizational approaches, seek ways to improve work-life balance and ensure equitable delineation of duties. Better yet, ask your technology employees for their input on lowering stress and lightening workloads.

#4: Conduct motivation checks — Regularly assessing your employees’ motivation for their work gives you valuable insight into their level of engagement and allows you to make strategic adjustments. Motivation checks also serve as an early warning system. “Regular assessment gives you the opportunity to identify the people who are thinking about leaving or who are somehow dissatisfied with the work or the environment,” says Gosewisch. He adds that getting regular feedback from employees often uncovers small management issues that can be corrected before they become big problems.

#5: Develop a sustainability strategy — Believe it or not, your company’s commitment to the environment, the community and innovation is very important to many key employees, especially Generation Ys and Millennials who often have the most experience with leading-edge technology. These two generations grew up surrounded with environmental messages they see as important. “An employer needs to show that it has a strategy to not only be profitable and exciting, but that it has a social and environmental conscience. It also needs to show that it allows employees inside the company to be innovative and have a voice,” says Steve Caballero, partner at U.S. Alliance Partners. “Making a profit at the expense of the planet, the community, and your people does not cut it anymore.”

*Dice

According to Dice, competition today for technology talent is extremely high.  The company states that tech professionals with specific skill sets, such as mobile application development or the ability to program in multiple languages, are in high demand. Several forces have converged to create a talent crunch in the tech sector, which is driving competition to lure tech talent and lucrative compensation packages for even newly minted tech professionals states Dice.