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Career Development
CIOs say that one of the best ways to motivate staff members is to help them develop their careers. For younger staff, training seminars can be helpful. But as IT employees advance professionally, they feel that training alone "isn't going to change your behavior," Walker says. As one CIO he interviewed put it, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks."
Instead, experienced IT professionals learn by doing, or at least by having the chance to do. Most of the 30 companies Walker interviewed realize this. When asked about their top strategy for developing and retaining business-focused IT staff, 29% said they were giving staff "stretch assignments" designed to expose them to different parts of the company or more senior management; and about one-fourth said they used job rotation. Only one-fifth listed training programs as a top staff development strategy.
Of course, it's easier to do job rotations in larger companies, where there are more positions available to shuffle into. But by the same token, with smaller staffs, midmarket companies are more likely to give a wider range of duties to individual workers. These broadly defined midmarket jobs might be considered "stretch assignments" somewhere else.
In Huber's case, cross-training did a lot to improve the morale of his client's IT staff. After he discovered that much of the staff was unaware of their employer's businesses goals, he got many levels of IT workers to spend days, or even weeks, learning about the business through the eyes of their internal customers. "It was pretty eye-opening for these guys. Some had been there for 10 or 15 years and really didn't have that much insight into what their business actually did," he says. (For the record, the business sells services, but Huber declined to be more specific for fear of identifying his client.)
Huber also added new positions: business analysts who test applications for their relevance to business needs. Previously, his client had tested its products only for technical problems.
At Jo-Ann Stores, all new hires spend a day or two in the retail stores, seeing how the company makes its money. In IT, Stack is getting all his staff, down to the most entry-level programmer, to participate in strategic meetings.
During these meetings, programmers hear about how, for instance, moving a product from one shelf to another can increase or decrease sales. "It makes them try to put their brains in the same shoes" as the strategists so they understand how their applications can affect what happens on the sales floor, Stack says. The process makes them more efficient, he says, but also gives them a better attitude about their work: "Having a clearer understanding of the impact they have is a big motivator."
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