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Overhauling Employee Morale
Many CIOs begin the new year with the aim of continuing their plans to improve IT's reputation and better align the department with the business. Toward that end, they worry about budgets, equipment and buy-in from the business side. But few consider the morale of the team they have to work with. That's a major oversight. When morale is low, staff turnover increases and the ability to complete projects grinds to a halt.
If a CIO can re-energize a sluggish staff, the payoff is tremendous. This is especially true for midmarket companies, where budgets are smaller, but so is the size of the staff. So a little attitude change goes a long way. In general, "it doesn't always cost a lot of money to change the root causes" of dissatisfaction, says Bill Huber, regional practice leader for the Southeast region at Tatum LLC, a consulting firm that specializes in IT management. "The bad news is, it usually takes some overhauling of perspectives."
Conversely, if a CIO can't motivate his staff, that bodes ill for his career, especially "if you are being evaluated for keeping your project teams excited about what they are doing for clients, and your boss doesn't think you are doing that," says Carol A. Hacker, a human resources consultant whose clients include Matrix Resources Inc., a midmarket IT staffing firm in Atlanta. Depending on how low morale has fallen, the process can take months or even years. Hacker says she worked with a client whose CEO destroyed morale by trying to shake things up with what appeared to be indiscriminate layoffs -- a "bloodbath," as Hacker describes it. "It took 10 years for morale to return to normal," she says. That happened only with almost complete turnover at the company.
In most cases, morale isn't that low. But fixing it still requires a lot of effort: communication, coaching, cross-training, personnel changes, a re-examination of reporting hierarchies and compensation, and above all, a basic grounding in emotional intelligence and organizational dynamics.
Trouble is, while most CEOs expect to find these skills among their top executives, including their CIOs, many CIOs don't measure up. "There's nothing in a typical CIO's career that prepares them for that. They have spent 20 years as a program manager, and one day they find themselves moving into the C suite. They're at a pretty major disadvantage" when it comes to people management skills, Huber says.
Those CIOs who do succeed in re-energizing their IT staffs usually get plenty of help. One of their best allies is someone from human resources who understands the business. In addition to recruiting, retaining and developing staff in general, a good human resources professional can help the CIO revitalize and retool the staff by establishing programs for cross-training and interdepartmental hiring, says Andy Walker, research director for executive programs at technology consultancy Gartner Inc.
Moving staff between IT and other departments is a key part of job satisfaction because it increases understanding all around. Unfortunately, many CIOs overlook this when it comes time to hire. According to a recent CIO survey conducted by Gartner, CIOs say one of their top three priorities is getting staff to acquire more business skills. But 69% of these same CIOs say they plan to fill vacancies from outside -- with people who don't know the business. "Only 11% said they were going to bring in non-IT people from the business side. That's strange to us," says Walker, given these CIOs' stated desire for staff with more business skills.
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