What's the biggest challenge facing your team? It could be productivity, perhaps recruiting the right people, or difficulty achieving business objectives.

These all add up to possibly your greatest team challenge...

Retaining your best employees!

Keeping your top cloud & IT infrastructure talent is crucial to your solutions provider business progressing, and to making life as a colleague and/or manager easier.

We've put together some top tips on how you can retain your best people.

Did we miss anything? Drop us an email at hello@infraview.co.uk so we can chat about how you build your cloud and IT infrastructure teams and raise employee satisfaction!

1. Hire the right people

The best way of ensuring you keep the best people in your team is to hire the right people in the first place. Ensuring you have a solid recruitment process in place, as well as a thorough understanding of your business’ goals and objectives is crucial to making the right hire at the right time.

You’re looking for people with technical skills as well as the usual array of communications, teamwork and competences. But most of all, you’re looking for those people who passionate about what it is your business is trying to achieve. Communicating this through the recruitment process will help you find the best people who align with your business’ culture and trajectory, giving you the best possibility to hold onto them in future.

2. Give your people opportunities

Imagine you go out to a restaurant but you find there’s no food on menu or the options they offer are dull and uninspiring. What would you do? Move onto somewhere else? Go home? Not go there in the first place?

If your people feel they are hitting a wall and don’t see exciting opportunities in their future, they’re likely to be looking elsewhere to achieve what they want to achieve. By giving them opportunities to upskill, expand their knowledge and take on fresh and exciting challenges, you will be able to hold onto your best people for longer.

3. Offer your people benefits

It goes without saying that benefits will always keep people around for longer. By offering competitive benefits to your employees you are encouraging them to keep working towards their goals in the business whilst being rewarded for their hard work and relationship with you as an employer.

The more benefits and flexibility you can offer your employees which make a valuable contribution to their well-being and way-of-life, the more likely you are to retain your best people.

4. Trust your people

An employee of a business wants to trust that the company they work for is going in the right direction. In order to show your best people that this is the case, communication is key. By communicating with your people about the direction of the business you will create a sense of ownership from top to bottom.

To get the best out of your people and cultivate trust you must lead with transparency, to build the relationships between you and your employees to keep them from looking for new opportunities.

By welcoming your people into business conversations and trusting them with more important tasks, you are bestowing on them a sense of trust which they will reciprocate through loyalty to your business and increased productivity and happiness.

5. Give your people a great work environment

Creating a work environment which celebrates both team and individual successes as well as promoting diversity will encourage more of your people to stay long-term. Many IT solutions providers offer many work-from-home/client site positions, so creating systems of ensuring those individuals are integrated within your business is crucial to alleviating alienation and to keep them closer to your business’ work and your values.

Inside your regional offices, you want to make the environment one that is pleasant to work in and not one that your people will dread seeing at nine on a Monday morning! There are lots of ways of achieving this, and plenty of ways to work in your business’ identity into those plans. It doesn’t have to be over the top (we’re looking at you ping pong tables!), but whatever you do it has to make your employees feel valued and trusted to do their best work.

6. Promote a healthy work-life balance

The idea of a healthy work-life balance has become more and more prevalent over recent years. Everyone has a life outside of work, and so if you keep making them come in early and leave late they are bound to start looking elsewhere.

IT solutions providers are a step ahead in the quantity of work from home opportunities they offer. Offering flexibility in where and how they work will make your people feel trusted and an integral part of the business who is allowed to act on their own agency.

It’s all about communication; listening to your people and talking to them about things that aren’t just work. Get to know them as people, not just cogs in the machine.

7. Prioritize two way feedback

Feedback is important in the development of pretty much everything. You can’t make something the best it can be without an outside perspective. Opening up communication with your employees will allow them to get much needed feedback on their own work.

The second step is to listen. You want to build trust between your employees and your business, and what better way than to listen to their concerns and problems in order to find solutions together.

Freeing up communication and giving your employees more trust is a sure fire way to keep them on board for longer.

8. Make your people feel valued

There are so many ways to make your employees feel valued. These don’t have to be grand gestures of appreciation; simply saying ‘thank you’ and ‘good job’ is a great way to make sure your employees feel valued by you as an employer.

On top of this, team lunches, work socials and other benefits will help build relationships in your teams and with the business brand, as well as letting them know that you appreciate the hard work they’re putting in to keep your customers happy.

9. Don’t micromanage

You’ve hired the best people through a great recruitment strategy, so why are you hounding them with micromanagement? The best way to manage is to offer clear direction, give your people plenty of space to do their tasks and then offer two-way feedback to improve the process and ensure you’re keeping your customers happy and achieving your business goals.

By keeping a beady eye on your employees you are destroying trust, and so making them more likely to leave. By keeping your work flow relaxed, you are giving your best people the breathing space they need and making them feel valued through this show of trust.

We hope those tips were useful in helping you retain your best cloud & IT infrastructure employees.

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