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September 27, 1999

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It takes challenging and meaningful work to keep IT staff happy.

By Robert A. Zawacki

eeping IT workers satisfied and motivated in their jobs has never been as critical to managers as it is today. The shortage of programmers, network engineers, technicians, and other IT workers is arguably worse than ever, and competition for limited resources is great. At the same time, because we're in such a fast-changing business and technology environment, keeping IT workers motivated and focused has perhaps never been as challenging.

The upshot: Even the most innovative companies in the world have trouble luring and retaining good people. Professor D.D. Warrick at the University of Colorado has given a name to these talented people: "gold-collar workers." IT leaders are finding that they must put in place a strategy to keep people motivated and satisfied on the job, particularly at a time when E-commerce and a growing emphasis on Internet business ventures is transforming IT departments and redefining people's roles within their organizations. Just as the move from mainframe-centric to distributed computing shook up the IT field in the past, the emergence of E-business-which seems to have taken place practically overnight-has forced rapid change in the way companies view IT.

How do technology managers retain and motivate their people in such turbulent times? There are six key factors that should be considered in any motivational program to increase productivity and help reduce turnover (see box, right).

First, and by far most important, managers need to ensure that people in IT have what they perceive to be meaningful jobs. My research, conducted during the past 25 years and continuing today, consistently shows that working conditions, benefits, job security, or company policies aren't what motivate people. What IT professionals keep saying in various ways is that they want exciting, meaningful, and challenging work. It's not a matter of making people happy so they can be more productive, as many business leaders assume, but keeping people productive so they can be satisfied with their jobs and their company.

Managers can identify those jobs that tend to lead to higher and lower motivation using an academic model called core job theory, which is based on the assumption that productivity leads to job satisfaction.

This model gives particular jobs a "motivation potential score" on a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is lowest and 7 highest. MPS is derived from five core job dimensions: use of a variety of skills, clear identification of a task, significance of a task, work autonomy, and feedback. The higher the score, the greater the potential that the worker will be motivated.

Once a job's score is determined, the goal is to match high-scoring jobs with people who want meaningful work. The "people variable" is referred to as "growth need strength" or GNS, which measures a person's ability to learn new technology and advance to new responsibilities, and determines their need for constant growth and stimulation. This variable is also on a scale of 1 to 7, where 7 is highest. Matching the person and the job can be quantified by measuring and comparing MPS and GNS. Our research shows that the match-up of GNS and MPS accounts for much of what motivates IT people.

If managers provide programmers, systems analysts, or network design engineers with meaningful work (with high MPS ratings), they'll more likely want to stay with the company. Telecommunications company MCI WorldCom is using the model and a database that has MPS ratings for 50 IT jobs. As an example, a design engineer at the company with a high GNS rating was assigned to work on the next generation of telephony-designing and implementing voice over data-a task with an MPS of 6.1. The engineer, not surprisingly, has a very positive attitude toward work.

Glen Tindal, director of MCI WorldCom networks, says matching the right people to the right jobs has become especially important as the company shifts its networks from being telephony- to Internet-based. "The results revealed that our internal data network engineering jobs have a high MPS, and we have extremely high GNS people," Tindal says. "My next step is to coach managers to become better leaders and to coach their people through these turbulent times to ensure that we attract and retain the best talent in the industry."

The reverse also holds true. If you give programmers less meaningful work than what they desire, they develop a less-than-positive attitude toward work. An example of this is in systems development after an application is designed and installed. Many customers demand that the same programmers who developed the system remain on the project and maintain the system. But research shows that the meaningfulness of work decreases as the IS development people move to maintenance.

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