Bangalore: With the increasing number of dissatisfied IT employees, many employment experts have raised concerns that key employees may leave current jobs as soon as they get what they perceive is a better offer, reports Computerworld.
In 2007, about 12 percent of the IT employees fit into the category of 'highly engaged' workers, but that has since fallen to four percent. According to the mid-2009 job satisfaction survey conducted by the Corporate Executive Board (CEB), a Washington-based advisory firm that counts many Fortune 500 firms among its clients, the IT employee dissatisfaction is on the rise. The firm surveys 150,000 workers each quarter, asking a battery of behavioral questions about their jobs. About 10,000 of the surveyed people work in the IT field, board officials said.
Also, the CEB's latest survey found that the willingness of IT employees to "exert high levels of discretionary effort" put in extra hours to solve a problem, make suggestions for improving processes, and generally seek to play a key role in an organization, has plummeted to its lowest levels since the survey was launched 10 years ago. "These are literally the most critical employees," said Jaime Capella, a Managing Director in CEB's information technology practice. Moreover, such critical workers are 2.5 times more likely than the average employee to be looking for new opportunities.
Similarly, the Conference Board, a non-profit research group, said that occupants of 45 percent of 5,000 U.S. households it surveyed last year were satisfied with their jobs; down from 61 percent in 1987, the first year the survey was conducted. "When the economy starts to head in the right direction, the employees are going to vote with their feet," said Mike Hagan, a Vice President of Infrastructure at a health insurance firm he asked not to be identified. He is also a Co-author of Achieving IT Service Quality - The Opposite of Luck (Synergy Books, Nov. 2009).
Hagan said that the recession has resulted in unnaturally low attrition levels. To keep key employees, he said that IT managers must find ways to engage employees, and offer them a "line of sight to the corporate vision." It's important that IT managers create jobs that have a purpose, he added.
Also Capella said, in order to keep employees, they are advising to take performance reviews very seriously, work on motivating teams and communicating more consistently and openly, as well as give employees more of a say in the jobs they want. If employees don't believe that companies aren't being honest, they are more likely to get disaffected, he said. If managers are frank with their employees they can "accumulate enough good will" to offset the negative impacts.
Comments (0)
Post a Comment