The Whats and Hows of DevOps Talent Retention

If you manage a team of DevOps engineers and find it hard to optimize between talent retention, upskilling and growth, you’re not alone. Engineers are more likely to quit their jobs than other tech workers.

According to a recent survey by Indeed, 46% of DevOps engineers said they are actively looking for a new job, in contrast to 34% of all tech workers. Figuring out the needs and wants of DevOps talent requires a thoughtful yet considerate approach. In this guide, we’ll cover what talent retention methods are used by some of the top companies out there and why their approach still works.

By the end, hopefully, you’ll be more comfortable with key techniques to help your DevOps team succeed.

1. Employee Data and Feedback Systems

Companies like Google consistently hire top candidates and outperform many other companies with regard to employee satisfaction, according to Glassdoor. One of the perks of being a Google employee is free breakfast, lunch and dinner—not to mention their nap pods. There is a major emphasis on culture and belonging, which requires a focus on data.

Creating a culture where ambitious, talented and remote employees flourish requires above-average insights into your employees and how they’re doing. But this often isn’t easy. Laszlo Bock, who heads Google’s People Operations Department, once said, “We try to bring as much analytics and data and science to what we do on the people side as our engineers do on the product side.”

Some of Google’s wide range of initiatives include longer lunch tables for employees to meet each other, three meals a day, plus unlimited snacks. The company’s heavy data initiatives even allowed them to promote smaller meals when they realized that “Googlers” were gaining weight.

Google’s reliance on data-driven analytics for HR should be commonplace for most companies, but this generally isn’t the case. In fact, almost everything Google does is based on data, even their hiring events, and it seems so far their approach has worked.
So why hasn’t this been replicated elsewhere?

While most companies do everything possible to cater to their customers, only 31% of companies measure employee experience; 81% of companies analyze customer experience.

This dichotomy suggests that companies are not willing to invest in resources that allow employees to raise concerns and provide feedback on how they’re doing. Even something as simple as utilizing comms technologies like Slack to their fullest can
trigger more interactions and help reinforce employee insights. As Greg Godbout, co-founder of 18F, recalled, “I can’t tell you how many people we hired who said, ‘I heard you guys were using Slack.’ It just meant that we were cutting-edge.”

2. Personal Development and Peer Recognition

When looking at all things personal development, not only does it further accelerate employees’ productivity, but it also contributes to a substantial decline in employee turnover rates over time.

It should then not be a surprise that some of the top reasons why DevOps engineers leave their jobs are:
● Lack of opportunities for growth and development
● Low salaries and benefits
● Unrealistic workloads and deadlines
● Toxic work culture

Given that a lack of opportunities for growth accounts for close to half of DevOps employees’ turnover rates, it once again highlights the importance of a well-planned approach to support ongoing learning.

By understanding employee employees’ performance, preferences and environment, a wider range of support offers can be implemented.

Providing tailored assignments that allow employees to focus on their skills or passion not only helps build commitment to the job but it also acts as a motivator. This can stem from a simple 15-minute project or a year-long program.

But advocating personal development courses and upskilling techniques are not enough. Employers must also harness peer recognition.

A sales organization within the United States Postal Service (USPS) recently made an attempt to boost peer recognition by enabling their employees to identify behavior associated with new skills learned by setting up a simple online platform. The group oversaw an overall employee engagement rise by 8% in the initial pilot group. Such strategies were then used to improve work across the organization.

Thus, tailored assignments and ongoing learning opportunities can contribute to satisfaction and employee retention. Additionally, leveraging peer recognition programs can foster a positive work culture and boost employee engagement – which drives down turnover significantly.

Just imagine if all of your friends worked at the same company—you would never want to leave, would you?

3. Gamification: Cultivating a Positive Work Culture

A recent study found that 90% of employees were more productive when their company started to use gamification. But, what exactly is gamification and how does this apply to DevOps in particular?

Gamification is the use of game design elements, mechanics and principles in non-game contexts to enhance user engagement, motivation and participation. It involves integrating aspects such as competition, rewards, challenges, levels and feedback into typically non-game environments to make them more enjoyable, interactive and effective. The goal is to influence behavior, drive desired actions and achieve specific objectives.

Some real-life examples of gamification include hitting a bell when a key project is completed or filling up a whiteboard with notifications to represent the completion of tasks.

In the context of DevOps, gamification can also be applied to enhance and optimize the software development and operations processes. It’s also one of the many methods businesses use to make the move to quiet hiring. Here’s how it can be implemented in a DevOps environment:

1. Skills Development and Training:

Gamification can be used to create interactive training modules and platforms that engage and educate team members about DevOps practices, tools and methodologies. By using game-like elements such as badges, leaderboards and levels, employees can track their progress, compete with colleagues and be incentivized to enhance their skills.

2. Process Improvement:

DevOps involves continuous improvement of processes. Gamification can encourage team members to suggest improvements and innovations by offering rewards, recognition or special badges for valuable contributions. In situations such as continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), a company could award points to employees for writing unit tests or deploying code to production.

3. Monitoring and Metrics:

Utilizing gamification to visualize key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics in a dashboard format can make it more engaging and easier for team members to track their performance and goals. Progress bars, achievements, and notifications can motivate teams to meet targets and improve their performance.

4. Cross-Functional Collaboration:

DevOps emphasizes collaboration between development and operations teams. Gamification can create team challenges that require members from both sides to work together, promoting a better understanding of each other’s roles and enhancing teamwork.

5. Incident Management and Response:

Handling incidents and outages efficiently is crucial in DevOps. Gamification can be employed to simulate incident scenarios, allowing team members to practice their incident response skills in a safe environment. Rewards and recognition can be given for quick and effective resolution of simulated incidents – particularly helpful in cybersecurity-related situations.

6. Feedback and Continuous Improvement:

Incorporating gamified feedback mechanisms where team members can provide input, suggestions, or feedback on processes and tools in a fun and interactive way encourages continuous improvement and fosters a culture of open communication.

7. Goal Setting and Achievements:

Setting achievable goals and objectives using a gamified approach, complete with rewards and recognition, motivates team members to work towards accomplishing these targets, driving productivity and alignment with organizational objectives.

Additionally, here are some specific examples of gamification in DevOps:

● A company could create a leaderboard to track the number of pull requests merged by each developer each week.
● A company could award badges to developers for completing specific tasks, such as writing a certain number of unit tests or fixing a certain number of bugs.
● A company could create a challenge for teams to see which team can deploy the most code to production in a given week.
● A company could give rewards to employees for completing certain tasks, such as giving them a day off or a gift card.

Overall, gamification in DevOps helps make work more engaging, promotes learning, enhances collaboration and drives a culture of continuous improvement, ultimately leading to better software development and operational outcomes. However, it must be noted that gamification should be used in a way that is appropriate for the company’s culture and employees. Gamification should not be used to pressure or exploit employees.

Conclusion

DevOps talent retention is a critical issue for organizations of all sizes. In the current competitive job market, DevOps engineers are in high demand, and it can be difficult to attract and retain top talent.

Nurturing and retaining DevOps talent requires a multifaceted approach that involves understanding employee needs, providing opportunities for growth and development and fostering a culture where employees are treated on par with customers.

By implementing data-driven practices, recognizing and leveraging peer contributions and incorporating gamification, organizations can create an appealing workplace that attracts and retains top DevOps talent, ultimately contributing to their long-term success and growth.