Comments on: Keeping talented employees https://www.robg3d.com/2014/09/keeping-talented-employees/ Blog of Rob Galanakis (@robgalanakis) Fri, 19 Sep 2014 01:34:41 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.1 By: robert kist https://www.robg3d.com/2014/09/keeping-talented-employees/#comment-233015 Fri, 19 Sep 2014 01:34:41 +0000 http://www.robg3d.com/?p=1638#comment-233015 Vala got it right, but one thing is missing, which is the context. That’s the rest of the company outside your team or project. That’s the boss above your boss, that’s HR, IT, etc. They have direct and indirect control over your team as well. Indirect i.e. when HR/Finance gives you a budget that you have to work with. Direct when they make rules your team must follow, rules that you cannot change, such as work-time, IT policy, etc. Anything you and your team does happens in these constraints.

If you’re lucky, the context works for you – e.g. your company has flex time, clever HR policies and rules that feel like the company trusts the employees and treats them as adults. But that’s the ideal picture. I think most places are somewhat inbetween. Here the question for you as middle management guy is: what can I do to compensate these weaknesses of my company?

For example if you’ve been put in charge of a service team and everyone expects you to do boring service tasks then there’s not much you can do to make the tasks itself more glorious. You have to work on everything else and compensate, so that people will end up saying “yeah the work is not so great, but XXXX is and that’s why I love working there!”. I don’t think you’ll ever be able to satisfy every single person in every aspect. You have to pick the aspects that you can satisfy and which have the most impact on your team, given the constraints your team is in.

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