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The Personal Touch
Ironically, though many CIOs reported to Walker that their careers benefited greatly from mentoring, not many act as mentors themselves because they don't have time or because they don't see how they benefit from the arrangement.
Those who do mentor, however, say that the arrangement makes their protégés feel better about working for the company. Robert Owen, who is vice president of information technology for Microchip Technology Inc., a manufacturer in Chandler, Ariz., has created a management development program that includes 13 members of his 100-person staff. In the hopes that some of them will become Microchip's future leaders, Owen meets with them to discuss the business and management philosophy.
"We would hope that the people participating in this feel a greater sense of participation and energy" in their jobs, Owen says, "because they're part of the future team."
Flex-Time
Back in the dot-com days, when companies routinely engaged in bidding wars over almost anyone who could fog a mirror, many employers sweetened their offers with perks, including flexible work arrangements like telecommuting or more days off in return for longer workdays. Later, when the same companies started slashing staff, these perks largely disappeared.
Now, many IT workers are routinely putting in 10- or 12-hour days, says Gartner's Walker, noting that much of the overtime is unpaid. That is leading to burnout. IT departments that rely on their staff to put in long hours "are going to lose talented people. Even their high performers don't want to work those long hours," Walker says. Some are fleeing to the public sector, where they are willing to work for less pay in return for more sane schedules.
In the next year or two, Walker expects competition to heat up for IT hires, especially project managers. As that happens, he expects to see some of the old perks return.
In some places, they already are. At AARP, for instance, Habash says that more than 30% of his staff have flexible work arrangements, including part- or full-time telecommuting and condensed workweeks, where staff work 10-hour days Monday through Thursday and take Friday off. Habash says his department can offer these arrangements because it measures performance in terms of work accomplished rather than time served.
In return, Habash gets happier workers. He knows this because every year his workers fill out anonymous surveys about the IT department, including when, whether and why they plan to leave. They say they like flexible hours. "It helps them a lot if they can balance their life with IT," he says.
None of the CIOs we interviewed believe that low morale is based on pay. "Most things don't indicate that pay is the primary reason why people leave" an IT staff, says Owen. "Almost every study there is says the No. 1 reason that most people leave is basically their manager."
But pay is part of what motivates workers, so it can't be ignored -- especially now that companies are starting to compete for certain types of IT workers, like project managers. In general, if most companies end up filling vacancies from the outside -- "poaching from each other," as Gartner's Walker likes to call it -- salary inflation is bound to follow.
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