How to retain your technical communications team's talent

Employers spend a lot of time and money finding and integrating talent into their teams. Most are convinced that the "right people" are crucial to their success, even if they sometimes fail to behave accordingly. When a productive person suddenly leaves his or her post, the remaining team members suffer, product quality gets compromised, and companies incur significant additional costs.

Hiring managers suffer more than most. In technical communications, not only do they typically not control their own budgets, but their teams are often deemed less vital to a product's success than their Engineering or Sales counterparts. When a technical communications team loses a key member, managers are typically told to 'make do' with what they have left. The results are familiar to all of us:

• Less time in which to do more work
• Longer hours (typically for no additional compensation)
• Less concern for product quality
• No time for 'non-essential' elements (including planning, editing, indexing, glossaries, and code examples)
• Lower morale
• Increased attrition

Stuck between resentful direct reports and unsympathetic senior management, technical communications managers whose teams have been compromised by a key person's resignation don't have many choices. If they tell senior management they need money to hire a replacement staffer or a contractor, they probably won't get it quickly enough to make a difference and, even if they do, there'll be an almost insane amount of pressure to find, then hire, exactly the right person — not to mention bringing him or her up to speed almost instantly. And if they push back on senior management to reduce the scope of the team's deliverables, they will frequently be blamed for their colleagues' departure and guilt-tripped into "sucking it up" and working harder to compensate for their 'mistake.' Threatening to quit if you don't get your way doesn't work either, because you'll always be remembered as the potential defector; companies tend to purge such 'liabilities' at their first opportunity. Synergistech sees this dynamic play out all the time; we know more than a couple publications managers who have ulcers.

What can a technical communications manager do? Once a key teammate leaves, not much. But before that person decides to leave, there are many ways — most inexpensive, some free — that a technical communications manager can encourage his or her team to remain intact. This is the fine art of technical communications talent retention.

What works?

Every employee's motivation is different, so it's important to task everyone working in the technical communcations department how they prefer to be rewarded to staying focused on the company's goals.

You may think that a steady paycheck and standard employment benefits are sufficient, but for all but mediocre employees that is not true. Except during economic recessions, talented individual contributors have many options. (It can be easy to overlook this fact when you, the technical communications manager, feel trapped by your compensation package, the absence of a growth path within the company, and the dearth of other local job opportunities.)

Here are 16 techniques that Bay Area technical communications managers find help them retain talent in a competitive labor market:

• Passing along compliments (including from customers, senior management, business partners, SMEs, and peers)
• Training your team (on tools, technical subject material, and skills such as project management)
• Subsidizing or underwriting trips to relevant conferences (for example, the STC annual conference)
• Putting your team in touch with real users (for example, to see how technical communicators' products are really used and which features are most valued)
• Implementing employee-recognition awards (public, formal thank you's and several levels of financial rewards to acknowledge special contributions)
• Setting up an 'Acknowledgement Board' (for example, an intranet site where anyone can share words of praise)
• Sharing personal thank you's (for example, leaving a voicemail expressing gratitude for each team member's individual contributions)
• Giving additional paid time off (including 'comp time' for overtime worked during deadlines)
• Allocating key contributors their own parking place, with a personalized sign (preferably near building entrance)
• Offering work-from-home privileges (or reimbursement for computer and software required to do so)
• Upgrading equipment (for example, 20" LCDs for those still using 17" CRTs)
• Assigning original responsibilities, such as developing a style guide, survey, formal presentation, or in-house training course (together with relief from routine tasks or deliverables)
• Offering key workers offices rather than cubicles
• Authoring credits (in other words, let technical writers put their names on the books they write and the training content they create)
• Giving authority (for example, share power as well as responsibility by making individuals project leaders, etc)
• Allowing individual contributors their choice of assignments

Summing up

All else being equal, employees leave a company because of a poor relationship with their immediate boss. Technical communications managers who have implemented even a few of the above suggestions find that that relationship — and the individual contributor's feeling of relevance and appreciation — improves dreamatically. Technical communications teams can be kept intact for years. Indeed, when a manager who's cultivated this kind of loyalty does move on, his or her former direct reports often follow suit quickly.

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