Fighting the Good Fight

Regardless of whether a staff member has handed in their notice for a good or bad reason, the act of handing in their notice puts the ball firmly in your court. What are you going to do next? This is a conundrum that many managers face. At the most abstract level, it boils down to two choices:

• You accept the situation and initiate the process for them to leave.
• You fight for them to stay.

No battle is fought without effort or concession, so you’ll need to think long and hard about what you want to do next. However, there’s an added element of difficulty. Typically, to receive a job offer from another company, your staff member will have committed a sizable amount of time, energy, and emotion into deciding to research open positions, put together applications, complete multiple interview rounds, and so on. Regardless of the fact that average tenure is shortening in technology, changing jobs is still something that takes considerable effort.

So, what are you going to do next?

First, you need to decide whether you want to fight to keep them at all. This is based on how well they perform. Are they your top performer? If so, you fight. However, if you can see your team surviving for a while without them and making a new hire may be beneficial for the team’s future, perhaps it’s better to let them go with your blessing.

You need to choose carefully who to fight for because keeping them will inevitably introduce some form of imbalance or inconvenience, or both, for the department. Typically, keeping a staff member will involve increasing their salary. However, even if it doesn’t, you may find yourself having to make other concessions that can be tricky to deal with in the short term, such as having them change teams or work on projects that better suit their desires while others have to pick up the slack. The question you have to ask yourself is: Are you willing to accept an imbalance to keep someone within your company? If the answer is yes, then you fight.

This begins with a conversation. What made them want to leave? You need to identify the causes. These causes could be:

• Money: Do they feel that they are underpaid compared to their peers or market rate? Do you think that is true?

• Career progression: Have they been unable to progress their career how they wanted to at the company? Is it actually possible to do so?

• Variety: Do they want to work on different projects or, perhaps, cross-train into using a different programming language? Do they want an altogether different role than they are already doing? Are the opportunities there? If not, can you create them?

• Frustrations: Have they suffered death by a thousand cuts where many tiny inconveniences and annoyances have become too much to bear anymore?