Why do people leave their jobs? It isn’t just because of salary or perks, says Andrew De La Torre, head of technology at Vodafone Americas. Access to the right productivity tools matters, especially to younger workers. In an interview with The Enterprisers Project, he explains why the IT department should become a marketplace for productivity tools, instead of being the people who forbid tools. Add some flexibility, he says, and watch the talent stick around.
The Enterprisers Project (TEP): How does employer loyalty vary between millennials and baby boomers?
De La Torre: It’s easy to see that there is a drastic difference between the way millennials and baby boomers are loyal to their employees. In fact, according to a Deloitte survey, two-thirds of millennials (born between 1982 and 2004) expect to leave their current employers by 2020.
This is, at least in part, a result of the drastic difference in the technology environments each generation was raised in. Millennials are a generation of people who grew up with the internet always at their fingertips and have digital applications and social media as a fully integrated part of their lives. Baby boomers cannot say the same.
Many people think millennials prefer to skip around from job to job because of the perks of the job, the mission of their work, or the people they get to work with. Yes, these are all factors, but what people don’t always realize is the influence that CIO decisions have on retaining this disrupted workforce. Millennials really care about the type of technologies they are allowed to use while on the job and where they can use them (in the office, at home, while traveling, etc.), and that’s where the CIO comes into play.
TEP: Do some employers focus on the wrong offerings when it comes to employee recruitment and retention?
De La Torre: Many employers focus on having a unique office space with great perks and benefits for employees. These are great and definitely important in retaining talent, but organizations need to realize that they must have infrastructure set up to support the technologies and applications that today’s workforce wants to use. Instead of gaining a sense of loyalty to the company they work for, as baby boomers may have done, this disrupted workforce is loyal to the digital tools they use to get the job done. There are so many different tools available today and many people have different preferences as to what they want to use to drive productivity and efficiency in their daily jobs.
Alongside the technology needs of this workforce is the fact that they want to be able to work whenever and wherever they are. This means that employers need to offer flexibility in their overall office structure, and make sure technologies are accessible no matter where the employee is working.
TEP: If having the right tools is important to retaining employees, what’s most important to them? What will bother them enough that they look for work elsewhere?
De La Torre: I’ve come to realize that one of the hardest things for the disrupted workforce to accept is the words “you can’t use that.” Millennials are educated and informed individuals who know what they want to do and how they want to do it so they’re motivated to seek out and access the tools they know can help them succeed.
If they’re not allowed to use their desired tools at an organization then they may start looking for places where they can use them. According to Vodafone’s “Flexible: friend or foe?” study, 72 percent of millennials say modern technology policies related to flexible working improve their overall work quality.
TEP: So which tools should you make sure to provide?
De La Torre: The problem is that there aren’t a set number of tools that you can safely say that, if you have them, you’ll make everyone happy. Instead, CIOs need to re-evaluate the traditional rigid guidelines for applications found in standard workplaces and open them up. By adding flexibility into guidelines for the different applications employees can use, CIOs will enable workers to leverage the tools that make them productive, but also happy in the workplace. Adding this flexibility to allow employees to work where they want and how they want can also affect a company’s bottom line. The “Flexible: friend or foe?” study also found that profits increased for 61 percent of companies with flexible working policies.
TEP: What advice would you give CIOs about recruiting and retaining today’s workforce?
De La Torre: First, CIOs need to realize that the processes and technologies they put in place across their organizations can have a tremendous impact on talent. Additionally, CIOs should strive to make themselves a true marketplace for employees to go to when looking for productivity tools.
To do this, CIOs must embrace the existing tools in their environments and remove any rigid or inflexible guidelines that may prevent the workforce from leveraging third-party applications. Given that today’s workforce is likely going to find a way to use these applications anyway, CIOs should embrace them in order to gain visibility into how they are being used, instead of having these applications used without your knowledge.
With the disrupted workforce becoming more and more a part of an organization’s employee base, the CIO must embrace an open environment where these tool-loyal employees can leverage the applications they need to do their job the way they want to do them.
