Naturally, we all go through periods of having exciting projects on at work which make us fall in love with our roles again; and times when finding motivation is harder. But if the thought of the end of the weekend and another week in work fills you with dread, this could be a sign that something is seriously wrong. Either you’ve outgrown your current role, your workplace has become toxic, or you realise that your passions lie elsewhere in a different position or with a new company with different values. There are some signs to look out for which indicate that it’s time to look for a new job.

Deciding on a career move can be a daunting thing, and that’s why many people try to ignore the warning signs that they should move on.

Today, we share the six undeniable signs it’s time to look for a new job (and how to find one).

1. You Have Stopped Enjoying Going to Work

There can be many reasons people are reluctant to leave the house in the morning, from a commute that is regularly filled with traffic to a lengthy train journey. But generally, travelling to work should not be a time where you dread the minutes counting down until your morning start time. Have you found yourself stopping off for a coffee to delay getting into the office; have you started taking the longer route to work; does the thought of work in the morning keep you from sleeping at night?
Of course, many more of us are working from home now, and so the physical act of going to work might soon become a thing of the past in many roles. But this feeling of dread can become present in morning Zoom meetings, when you’re on a conference call or any time work-related messages pop-up on your screen. A sense of dread when you think about your job is not normal – if this is happening to you, it’s time to make a change.

2. You Feel Disconnected From Your Role

High employee engagement is a characteristic of all excellent employers. Great tech employers will ensure that you have the right amount of work to do; that you’re not overworked or frequently find yourself with few tasks and unsure what you should be doing. You should feel a passion and drive for your role, and a connection to your team and your employer which makes you want to give your best to the job – it was probably there when you applied for this position.

But over time, inadequate management can lead to employees feeling disconnected and then eventually stop caring. It is hard to find enthusiasm for your role when you have become disconnected. Will you ever trust that your employer truly cares about you even if things change in the short-term?

3. You are Taking Extra Sick Days

Taking extra sick days, or taking holidays simply to get away from your job is a sign that something is wrong. It is estimated that 12.7% of all sick days are taken due to mental health problems, which can often be attributed to your current role in the first place.

If your mental health is being affected due to your job, first speak to your manager. They have a duty of care to you to ensure that your position is not causing you harm. Sadly, if the problems are out of your manager’s control, and they continue, it might be time to look for an employer who has an excellent wellbeing reputation.

4. You Don’t Get on With Your Boss (or Your Colleagues)

Having a great relationship with your boss and your colleagues is never a given in any role – it’s always a nice added bonus when you find a role you love, and you get on with your team. But negative relationships with the people you work with every day can quickly become draining, and they can turn a once dream job into a nightmare situation.

There should always be avenues you can explore before it gets as serious as leaving for a different company, but sometimes that’s what it takes. Toxic workplaces are sadly more common than you might think, and although your job might look great on paper, if your boss regularly puts you down, and the atmosphere in the workplace is continually negative and is holding you back from success in your job role and your whole career, it’s time to find a company where you not only feel fulfilled but also happy.

5. You’re Being Underpaid

48% of employees feel that they are underpaid for the work they do – does this sound familiar? When you start a job, the expectations might have been clear, but what commonly happens in [IT] workplaces is that over time, and as you become more experienced within the organisation, you are tasked with more and more duties.

And your remuneration rarely increases with the amount of extra work you are now expected to do. It might be a simple case of your manager not realising how much extra outside of your role you are taking on – but this again is poor management on their part.

Suppose you are increasingly given extra tasks or are performing managerial duties and your employer tells you that you are not going to be paid any extra for it. In that case, this is a sign that your employer is taking advantage of you.
Not all IT employers behave like this – now should be the time to find one who doesn’t.

6. You Feel Undervalued

Aside from being paid a fair wage for the work you do, it is also important that you feel emotionally valued and supported by your manager and your colleagues.

Signs that you are being undervalued by your current employer include:

• your work is overlooked,
• your performance and pay reviews are continually pushed back,
• you’re not trusted to have autonomy in your role,
• those around you are promoted, and you get left behind.

Being undervalued can be a sign that your current employer is not going to support you in your career and that things are unlikely to change unless the entire company has a management shake-up – but you don’t have to wait for this to happen.

Next Steps

Many people stay in roles that are making them severely unhappy and impacting on their mental health because they believe there is no other option for them.

The truth is there are always other options; you just might not know where to find them – and that’s where we come in.

About Inspire People

We believe that technology has the power to change the world for the better and we love working with businesses whose technology or purpose has a positive impact. We help businesses that share our vision access the people, resources and strategic advice they need to achieve their digital transformation goals.

Our service is designed to accelerate your digital growth. We created our offer in response to emerging challenges in an uncertain business landscape: a blend of Advisory, Talent and Project led services that will help you achieve your strategic aims and deliver more for your employees and customers. We’ll connect you to rare specialist talent, experts and insight to help you navigate your biggest challenges and remain competitive in a changed world.

Get in touch today to discover how working with us could help you innovate and grow.

Speak to our expert team on +44(0)20 7871 8550 or email hello@inspirepeople.net

As we are now living in a world that has been changed by the pandemic, your employee retention strategy must be better than ever.

A pre-pandemic Retention Report by the Work Institue (2019) found that “one in three workers would voluntarily leave their job by 2023”. And this has only increased due to significant shifts in the market due to Covid-19.

The effects of the pandemic are going to be felt in tech organisations for years to come, and so employee retention needs to be a key focus in order to ensure you are keeping your team engaged and satisfied in their roles.

Hiring for replacement team members is not something any tech organisation wants to be doing right now, and so an excellent employee retention strategy is essential.

The following 8 strategies will help.

1. Discover Who You’re Overlooking

To ensure you are providing excellent leadership for your entire team and making them feel valued, first, it is essential that you find out if you are overlooking anyone in your team.

IT teams will naturally include individuals with all manner of skills, experience and personality types.

But in most tech teams, there will also be team members who shine brighter than others – extroverts tend to get noticed more than introverts, some team members are more likely to speak up if they have a problem whereas others will try to work through challenges on their own.

As a leader, it is essential that everyone is getting the right amount of support that they need and that you are not overlooking anyone.

Tech leaders will naturally look to middle managers and other higher-profile employees, but to be a great leader, you must ensure the highest level of employee retention – remember that each and every team member must feel valued and supported.

2. Create Unlimited Opportunities for Growth

According to a recent LinkedIn Workforce Learning Report, 93% of employees would stay longer with their employer if they invested more in developing their careers.

Many IT employers will get to the point where they have a great team in place and think that their job is ‘done’.

But continual training and development is a key part of every employee retention strategy, and we find that talented candidates who look for new IT roles often cite a desire to develop themselves and their career further as a reason for leaving.

No-one wants to be stuck in a role where they feel as though progression is an unlikely possibility.

So invest in robust training and development for your team – it can be anything from personal development training to allowing them time to learn new technical skills.

3. Demonstrate Excellent Values and Ethics

The most desirable IT employees are looking for employers with impressive values and ethics.

And this has been accelerated by the pandemic. We are all thinking much more about what is really important to us, and working for a company they believe in is high on every IT employee’s list of priorities.

IT employees are more empowered than ever, with social media and online review culture creating an environment where the need to be honest and transparent is more crucial than ever.

How active is your company at demonstrating your values and ethics? Do you champion diversity and inclusion? Are you financially transparent?

Fail to demonstrate excellent values, and you risk losing your employees to a more ethical company.

4. Give Employees a Purpose

It is not enough to give employees a fair remuneration package – employees are increasingly looking for a greater sense of purpose in their work.

The best way to find out if your employees feel a sense of meaning and purpose in their work is to talk to them.

Ask them what is important to them in their roles, and make any alterations you can to help them feel a greater sense of purpose. This could involve introducing tools to make their jobs easier, and thus, more valued, or working together to improve your products or services to give greater customer satisfaction.

And create a mission statement which helps employees to understand how their work positively impacts the world.

5. Enhance Your Employer Brand

Your employer brand is the thread that links employees to the organisation – all employees want to work for a company which they feel aligned to.

Look closely at what your competitors are doing – if you slip in terms of promoting and maintaining an excellent employer brand, this gives employees the opportunity to look elsewhere and to be tempted to leave to work for a brand with a better reputation and culture.

Your digital footprint is key in creating a strong employer brand which your employees will feel proud to be a part of.

Think about what you post and how often. IT employees like to see that their employer is actively engaged in current IT topics, is invested in the wellbeing of the team and is a transparent and communicative employer.

Get your employees involved in team strengthening events, use your social media to champion your current employees – celebrate birthdays, life events and little wins within the organisation.

And finally, let’s look at how a great recruitment strategy is always essential when it comes to employee retention.

6. Get Your Recruitment Strategy Right

Employee retention all starts with your recruitment process.

When you start your IT employees off on the right foot with an excellent recruitment and onboarding process, this sets the tone for a mutually beneficial employer-employee relationship.

Studies reveal that the better the onboarding process, the lower the turnover.

A shocking 20% of employee turnover happens within the first 45 days, and this is mostly down to a poor onboarding process.

Onboarding is part of the recruitment process, and yet many employers believe that recruitment stops the moment the candidate accepts the job offer.

Invest in your recruitment and onboarding process, and you will start to see a higher rate of employee retention.

Finally

A certain amount of staff turnover is unavoidable.

But follow the steps in this guide to improve unnecessary employee turnover in your organisation.

It’s never easy to lose a great employee, but when you work with a specialist Tech recruiter, they can help you create the right recruitment and onboarding process to ensure your retention rates remain high, increasing employee engagement and lowering your overall costs of recruitment.

About Inspire People

We believe that technology has the power to change the world for the better and we love working with businesses whose technology or purpose has a positive impact. We help businesses that share our vision access the people, resources and strategic advice they need to achieve their digital transformation goals.

Our service is designed to accelerate your digital growth. We created our offer in response to emerging challenges in an uncertain business landscape: a blend of Advisory, Talent and Project led services that will help you achieve your strategic aims and deliver more for your employees and customers. We’ll connect you to rare specialist talent, experts and insight to help you navigate your biggest challenges and remain competitive in a changed world.

Get in touch today to discover how working with us could help you innovate and grow.

Speak to our expert team on +44(0)20 7871 8550 or email hello@inspirepeople.net

The world of work has changed dramatically in recent years, and the pandemic has heightened awareness for the importance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

Recently, there has been an increased realisation from employers that they need to be doing more to promote diversity and inclusion.

A recent CIPD survey found that two-fifths of employers said that they believed a prior investment in diversity and inclusion would help them respond effectively in a crisis to both employee and customer needs.

There are numerous benefits for both employers and their teams when equality, diversity and inclusion are championed in your business.

Today, we look at why this is and how to build a more diverse team.

Keeping Your Diversity and Inclusion Commitment

It is no secret to employers that a diverse technology team is a productive team.

A Harvard Business Review report found that when making decisions, teams with a diverse make-up outperformed individual decision-makers 87% of the time. Plus, diverse teams are proven to have increased innovation and creativity, have higher employee engagement, and they generate increased profits.

But unfortunately, during the ongoing Covid-19 situation, diversity and inclusion have slipped down the list of priorities for many organisations.

Before the pandemic, 14% of employers ranked diversity and inclusion as one of their top three priorities, whereas further into the lockdown, only 5% still counted it as of high importance.

Equality, diversity and inclusion, although it has certainly gained momentum in recent year as an important issue, should not be treated by employers as a ‘trend’ to dip in and out of when it suits them.

It is something that needs to be built into the mission, vision and ethos of your company.

The Equality Act 2010 states that no individual should be discriminated against in the workplace due to their age, disability, gender, marital status, race, or religion. And yet, in 2020, there is still a lot of work for many organisations to do to ensure that they are operating an entirely equal and inclusive working environment.

So, let’s look at how technology employers can ensure they are championing equality, diversity and inclusion in their place of work.

1. Create a Culture of Equality

One of the more challenging elements of creating a fair and equal environment in your technology workplace is changing the climate that may have been in place for many years, sometimes even decades.

Management styles can get passed down through generations in tech based organisations, as one set of managers and leaders replaces another and picks up subtle ways of working, which can become set within the company ethos.

At best, this can include acting and behaving a certain way which only serves a few individuals out of a whole team, hiring the same type of people. At worst, it can mean actively shunning certain groups of people – and remember, this can be done consciously and subconsciously (we will discuss unconscious bias in more detail in the next section).

So to combat inequality, and cultivate a culture of equality, this needs to be addressed at the most basic level by including an equality, diversity and inclusion article in your company mission statement.

But including an equality objective in your tech based organisation is just the first step.

Remember to continually review and evaluate your policies and procedures to ensure that equality is present in:

• Your recruitment
• Career opportunities and promotion decisions
• Learning and development
• Disciplinary procedures
• Performance management

Next, let’s look at tackling unconscious bias in your Tech workplace.

2. Managing Unconscious Bias

Unconscious bias can affect all of us, but it is essential that it is managed effectively in your organisation, from whom you choose to employ, who you choose to promote, which members of the team you ‘prefer’ working with and how members of your team engage with each other.

Of course, we are naturally attracted to people with whom we can find common ground, and this affects the way we interact with others both in the workplace and out of it.

You could look into training programmes for the entire team on how to spot and tackle unconscious bias – this type of bias is so ingrained that we often don’t realise that it is happening.

There are also some ways to spot and stop unconscious bias in your workplace, including:

Being aware of the potential for unconscious bias – talking about it with employees and making them aware of how their interactions can affect others.

Question yourself and the decisions you make regularly – have you chosen a certain individual for a new project because they are the best person for the job, or because you tend to favour them?

Create a support network for employees – let them know that if they feel they have been overlooked or singled out due to a bias, that there will always be support for them and that you will actively work to remedy this.

Finally, let’s look at the easiest place to champion diversity and inclusion in your workplace – your recruitment process.

Championing Diversity in Your Recruitment Process

If you are committed to increasing equality, diversity and inclusion in your organisation, your recruitment process is where you can start to make positive changes.

Recruitment can be a complex and emotionally-charged event.

Many employers and hiring managers have very stringent ideas of whom they believe they are looking for, for a particular role. And of course, this affects the potential for a diverse workforce.

Whether conscious or not, it is a fact that hiring managers like to hire people who remind them of themselves.

But this makes for a very un-diverse workforce.

What can be done to reduce bias in your recruitment process?

You can introduce blind skills challenges, make use of AI in your recruitment process or use new and different channels to advertise your roles. You can also work with a dedicated Tech recruiter.

Working with a recruiter will allow you to reduce the amount of bias in your recruitment process, not only as they will work as a mediator between the company and the candidates, which allows for a completely unbiased selection process. But they can also challenge your ideas of the kind of candidate you are looking for and can locate candidates that you would never have been able to access when working alone.

Remember – creating a diverse workforce leads to higher engagement, greater productivity and is better professionally and personally for every member of your team.

About Inspire People

We believe that technology has the power to change the world for the better and we love working with businesses whose technology or purpose has a positive impact. We help businesses that share our vision access the people, resources and strategic advice they need to achieve their digital transformation goals.

Our service is designed to accelerate your digital growth. We created our offer in response to emerging challenges in an uncertain business landscape: a blend of Advisory, Talent and Project led services that will help you achieve your strategic aims and deliver more for your employees and customers. We’ll connect you to rare specialist talent, experts and insight to help you navigate your biggest challenges and remain competitive in a changed world.

Get in touch today to discover how working with us could help you innovate and grow.

Speak to our expert team on +44(0)20 7871 8550 or email hello@inspirepeople.net