How Does a CIO earn $1M per year?
In today’s knowledge-based economy, the functions of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) are becoming increasingly complex and multi-dimensional. This complexity has resulted in high turn-over, leading to the nickname, Career Is Over. In spite of this, some twenty-two CIOs/CTOs topped the $1 million annual compensation mark in 2010, according to Janco’s research. With this remuneration comes greater expectations. These folks better be providing significant value to the business. How do executives contribute more than they already have?
Generally, working more hours is not an option. This leaves working smarter. Thinking and acting more strategically will differentiate top tier managers from their less resourceful counterparts, allowing them to increase value. According to the research company Ovum, in their report from Dec 2011, “Big data analytics, security and cloud computing will be three of the most significant drivers of technological change in 2012.” It also predicts “that CIOs will become major enablers of innovation for the business, playing a central role in operational & commercial strategy.”
Sounds wonderful, but IT departments are undergoing yet another massive upheaval, led by cloud computing, social media, and IT consumerisation. Terms like BYOD or BYOS (Bring Your Own Devise/Software) are commonplace as the personal computer gives way to personal mobile devices like smart phones and pads. These trends, coupled with the proliferation of social media, bring instant transparency and creates a new level of user demands with new security issues. Managing through these changes while delivering is a tall order.
This month’s letter will give some tips to help you lead and navigate your organization into the next decade:
- Decisions – Be decisive:
Making snap decisions can be more cost effective than taking significant time to evaluate all aspects of a decision. The issue of decision-making is being considered on a much wider level than by only productivity gurus. The New York Times posted a column from John Tierney on their website titled “The Price of Dithering.” Dithering really can be quite expensive. An inability to move forward on a decision or project has a hidden opportunity cost that does not appear on an income statement. In addition, the financial upkeep required to have your team ready to spring into action once a decision has been made is high. Avoiding these price tags is a matter of improving your ability to make rapid fire decisions and move on. Taking 6 months to save the company 10% on the cost of a project could cost twice in unseen costs than it saves.
2. Communications – Be direct
Use clear, concise, and complete communication with your staff and customers. By implementing direct communication with management of large companies, you can recover an additional 13 percent of their time (spent on planning or other high value activities). Such strategic thinking builds innovative businesses with increased profitability, happy employees and satisfied customers. Ensure your communications have sufficient context to assist your team in understanding decisions and rationalize initiatives.
3. Simplicity – Less is more
Theoretical scientists spend their lives looking for simple answers or solutions. The reason is complexity is difficult to recreate. Take a recipe, the easiest and quickest are the recipes you will use most often. Business processes are the same. Humans are inherently lazy and will seek the path of least resistance. Simple solutions will always be more appealing than highly complex ones, even if the simple one is not quite as good. It is often more difficult to design simple processes initially, but it has the biggest pay-off and highest adoption rate.
4. Plan for the future.
This seems self-evident, but so many fall pray to the feeling that they do not have enough time to create a plan. By creating a road map of where you want to take your organization, you significantly increase the odds of actually getting there. Without planning, managers fail to make effective decisions, which leads to chaos and inefficiency. By having a plan in place, you make decisions faster and can choose or select components based on whether they align with the intended direction you want to take your organization.
Many things are changing around us and we are entering new phase: cloud and mobile are the keys to this evolution. Yet many things remain universal. All humans desire subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, leisure, creation, identity and freedom. Great managers seek to provide these to their team even during the greatest technological changes.
Do you know what motivates your staff?
Most people in the technology industry are generally considered smart, and highly skilled in math, logic and problem solving. However, these highly developed technical skills usually come at the expense of their interpersonal skills. IT managers are not immune to this imbalance and spend little time to improve these underdeveloped skills. Making matters worse, we recognize and promote based on results and reward for performance. The consequence is that managers spend 95% of their time focusing on measurable items and pay little attention to the emotions of their staff. This is not because managers don’t like people or don’t care, but few of them have an idea of what employees really want from a boss.
“But that warm fuzzy is what HR does. I do delivery,” is the common retort. True, but employees do not leave a job because HR did not give them enough hugs. The old adage holds true; people join companies but leave managers. Surveys show individuals quit for 5 main reasons: pay, management, career advancement, benefits and other. Many of these can be influenced by management. We can reduce turnover simply by understanding your staff’s desires.
The following CIO letter will shed some light on what matters most to workers. The results from a survey of 500 employees by the Lore International Institute over a 2 year period shows some interesting insight and some pretty basic things we can all improve on. Here are the findings:
More than 90% of employees want honesty and integrity from their managers. An equal number desire fairness across all staff and for management to hold everyone accountable to the same standards. Furthermore, just over 75% indicated they sought after trust, respect, dependability, collaboration and appreciation. But only 14% wanted interesting conversations from their manager and only 3% wanted them to be a friend.
These requirements seem easy to roll out but can be difficult to sustain. We, as managers, will revert to our natural personalities. So what else can be done? Fortunately, Randstad surveyed 6000 people throughout North America giving more insight. What will make them happy?
| Job Flexibility | 72% |
| Liking the team they work with | 71% |
| Pleasant work environment | 68% |
| Workplace is an easy commute | 68% |
| Challenging work | 65% |
| Job security | 65% |
| Ability to work independently | 59% |
| Opportunity for advancement | 55% |
Based on these results, here are 6 suggestions to improve employee satisfaction and lower turn-over:
- Make the work space look better; get rid of office clutter (cables, computer equipment, books, files, etc.), get some plants, find local schools for art, replace lighting with full spectrum light bulbs and use creative ways to make the environment better.
- Try to hire local; the closer staff live to the office and the shorter the commute will increase loyalty and happiness.
- Find ways to allow people to work from home on occasion.
- Establish flexible work hours when possible, sometimes four day work weeks would make sense.
- Look for ways to give more self-direction to your staff.
- Have an off-site staff bonding session to promote team work; it can be as simple as a soccer or baseball game in the park.
Lastly, here are 4 things you should say on a regular basis:
“How can I help?” This statement will aid you in determining impediments your staff face in performing at their best.
- “Great job on…” Any praise is welcome by everyone. We all crave appreciation and receiving it can be more motivating to staff than anything else.
- “Can I have your thoughts on…?” Engaging your staff in decisions and discussion will make them feel part of the solution and not just a cog in the wheel.
- “Thank you.” Two words that can never be over used. Using them more often is not simply for common courtesy, but as a way of connecting and showing appreciation for a job well done.
Try some of these ten pointers; you may find them to be successful in helping you to reduce your turn-over. We advise not to try all of them since you might find some cynicism from your team, especially the younger members.
Do your employees hate their jobs?
We have come through a pretty wrought economic period; many have coined it the Great Recession. Most of the 1st world fared far worse than Canada like the US, Ireland, UK, Iceland and Greece to name a few. The impact we faced here was significantly shorter and less deep. The Canadian job market has now recovered all the positions we lost during the recession. As with most economic slowdowns, the end is marked by a large wave employee turnover. Most companies are just starting to grow again, consequently many companies are caught flat-footed by this turn-over and they see many of their great people leave. This CIO letter is to outline what is happening with the labour force and how to manage through it.
Where does this turn-over come from?
Recessions create some interesting dynamics in the labour market. There are 4 main forces that influence people:
- Employee layoffs – during a recession companies stop hiring and then slowly start their lay-offs, initially the C players are cut, then as the recession takes hold, under-utilized resources and over paid resources and finally entire departments and companies are released.
- Staff Stasis – with lack of jobs and layoffs, people stop looking for work and with a fear of unemployment, they tolerate much more to keep their pay check. The result is employees do whatever it takes to keep working.
- Contractor Convert to Full time – a slower economy produces less project work thus creates less work for contractors. These workers react in a predictable manner by taking full time positions at lower pay.
- Under-employment expands – with higher unemployment; people take any work to pay bills. Often taking positions they are over-qualified for, outside their career path and most likely at much lower salaries than they earned at their previous position.
These main crosscurrents result in very little voluntary employee turn-over during a recession. While companies benefit with lower voluntary turnover during the slow down, the downside of this stability is a pent-up demand for a change in employment. As soon as the layoffs stop and companies begin to hire again, people dust off their resume and start cruising the job boards. This causes a problem for companies. If a company has 1,000 employees and they need to grow by 10%, but their turnover has increased from 5% to 15%, hiring over 200 additional people than you hired the year prior is required. That adds a substantial unexpected cost to an organization.
The latest survey from Right Management confirmed we have now entered this phase of the business cycle. They surveyed 1400 people and found 84 percent planned to look for jobs in 2011, up from 60 percent last year.
Why do people leave?
Interestingly, the reasons for leaving are very stable and have a similar pattern post recession as that prior to the recession. In a survey from Salary.com here the top reasons:
| Inadequate Compensation |
25.7% |
| Inadequate Career Opportunity |
16.8% |
| Insufficient Recognition |
15.4% |
| Boredom |
9.0% |
| Inadequate Benefits |
7.6% |
| Inadequate Professional Development |
6.9% |
| Insufficient Job Security |
5.3% |
| Impact on Health or Stress Level |
4.7% |
| Poor Management |
4.5% |
| Undesirable Commute |
4.0% |
Some of these issues are difficult to resolve, but fortunately you can do things to improve some areas. One way to determine underlying issues is to implement an employee satisfaction survey for your team. You may find some gold nuggets that you can use to increase job satisfaction. This improvement will lead to productivity improvements and reduced turnover. Other good advice is to just listen to your employees and observe changes in behaviours. These are very good for determining employee happiness.
Some of the reasons for turn-over can be traced back to the initial recruitment. For example, commute times impact 4% of a person’s decision to leave. Our advice to our clients when recruiting people is that 60% of their hiring decisions should be on personality fit. Understanding a candidate’s career aspirations and motivations up front will reduce the possibly of their leaving because of career or boredom. Also, don’t over promise or over sell the job, you need to be realistic and honest about the duties and career growth.
Some minor improvements to understanding your team better and improving your hiring processes will help your organization manage through this turnover period.