If you're in a leadership role or own your own business, you already know the challenge and importance of retaining top talent and driving growth. This article gives you three practical ways to tackle retention and grow your organisation, particularly when confronted with today's ever-changing business environment.
With 94% of organisations using some form of cloud computing, sourcing and retaining cloud engineers is increasingly tricky, especially with organisations that manage their cloud environment in-house. We have found that keeping engineers is directly related to the perceived value they believe they're delivering to the business. Providing them with the opportunities to work on meaningful projects that introduce business value should take some precedence. Engineers are a significant investment, so challenge them with important and meaningful projects — or someone else will.
1. Standardise and Simplify — “Works on my machine”
With remote work now more accepted, astute businesses are exploring ‘ephemeral’ development environments that spin up and down on demand. These dynamic or short-lived environments streamline onboarding and speed up software development.
Ephemeral development environments empower collaboration and boost productivity compared to traditional, ‘static’ development environments — especially between remote team members. And removing friction from development environments helps with reproducible outcomes. The shared environment setup enables engineers to slide between projects, contract work or onboard engineers with incredible ease.
Keen on getting started?...
Investigate options that work for your business. Itoc recommends dev environments such as: Cloud9, GitHub Codespaces, Gitpod and Jetbrains Space
2. Secure early and Often - “Leverage ways to automate early detection”
With cybersecurity becoming more of a consistent and unpredictable threat to individuals and businesses alike, security should be front of mind and consideration for everyone. Mastering the basics of cybersecurity is easy these days, and it no longer needs to be the last step before final production. Implementing solid CI/CD processes will help you standardise build and deploy processes (so you can find what works well and repeat it), and it also helps with security checks.
How to step up your cybersecurity game:
- Ephemeral development environments ensure no bad packages affect development
- CI/CD process implementation
- IaC enables scanning before the environment has been deployed. Tools like Snyk and TFSec make this process a breeze
- Early detection of potential security threats or issues are made easy by code scanning tools such as Snyk, GitHub Code Scanning.
3. Partnering - The advantage of letting someone else do the repetitive work
The high achievers and control freaks with impeccable standards will have difficulty with this one. Even though it is challenging to let go of some work, it is the only way to ensure your business grows and becomes more efficient. Freeing up your engineers to deliver value-adding projects will grow your business and help your top talent derive satisfaction in their careers, which will encourage them to stay with you. Working smarter — not harder — and handing over those repetitive tasks frees your scarce, valuable talent to build projects that will grow your business substantially.
Ways to achieve this…
- Handover less-desirable but essential work to an accredited Managed Service Provider (MSP) that will manage patching and repetitive tasks
- Investigate serverless environments and managed services to let vendors manage the lower-level systems that are necessary but don’t bring your business value