A recent article in the Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704113504575264432377146698.html) reports on the increasing trend of employees voluntarily leaving their jobs. Two contributing factors are noted: the improving job market and, most significantly, the pent up dissatisfaction and anger towards their current work environments. In the recent economic trouble, many corporations and institutions instituted cost cutting measure that have severely hurt or outright destroyed employee morale and loyalty. Layoffs, salary cuts, benefits cuts, repeated reorganizations, freezes on wages and new hires have all taken their toll on employee respect for their management and the firms they work for. Perhaps far more damaging to loyalty than these direct actions has been indirect impact such as massively increased workloads and the general stress and tension of the times.

When employees leave, there are not only the obvious costs of recruitment, hiring, and explicit training of their replacement, but substantial intangible costs that are incurred. These include the time it takes the new employee to "come up to speed" on the job, build relationships with clients and coworkers, integrate with existing project teams, and more. Projects are delayed with employee loss. Additional workloads, pressure, and stress are displaced to other staff while openings are filled, thereby increasing the drivers incenting others to find better positions elsewhere.

Leaders need to be prepared that as the job market continues to improve, their organization could face record levels of employee turnover. IT Leaders have a unique role to play in addressing this looming trend for their organizations. All leaders should be considering the impact choices they have made over the last two years may have on employees in their groups. It is never too late to take corrective action, and whether you engage in Town-Hall style meetings referenced in the WSJ article linked above or a host of other approaches taught in leadership classes or learned from experience, you should engage in activities to assess the state of your employees and improve morale and loyalty. Numerous books on executive leadership will tell you that loyalty and retention is not really about salaries and benefits, but about bidirectional respect and trust between employees and their leadership.

IT Leaders have a further responsibility and that is to compensate for the poor leadership qualities elsewhere in their organizations by protecting their organization from loss of information and knowledge due to employee turnover. When operational knowledge is embedded in clearly and fully documented cross-functional processes with information systems supporting those processes, abrupt employee turnover is easier to absorb. On-line training systems, corporate WIKIs, documentation repositories, and many other supporting systems can capture institutional knowledge out of employee's heads and into systems where it can be easily passed on to new employees. Now is the time for IT leaders to review such systems across their organizations against the coming business needs and partner with their peers and Human Resource leadership to make improvements where needed. A small example step may be mining all company systems to report to the manager of a departing worker and/or Human Resources all of the assorted systems, documents, projects, etc. the exiting staffer had access to. Can you currently provide such a profile or do you just assume that the employee's manager should "know" everything the employee had access to? If you are assuming ... well you know the old saying that to assume makes and 'ass' out of 'u' and 'me'.

Action now also may prevent a vicious cycle that impacts IT groups in times like these. As departments lose staff, the volume of projects they request from IT often goes up. "If only we could automate this task, we can free up these people to do what the people that left used to do." The real need for the additional projects and pressure on your customers is understandable. Sadly, as every IT Project Manager knows, projects are not successful without active customer involvement and the same need that is driving up the project load (missing workers) is also impacting clients' available time for projects, making requirements harder to obtain or testing little more than rubber stamping. Fewer projects are needed during such times, not more. Education and intervention now by IT leadership can help reduce growth in demand on IT as turnover occurs elsewhere in the organization, thereby helping to alleviate the circumstances that would increase IT turnover when it can least be afforded.