She says studies show that Millennials and GenZers crave career and professional development, with several studies suggesting that 80% or more of them would leave a company that doesn’t offer personal development opportunities.

“Learning cannot just be an afterthought — it must be a core focus of any strong organization,” agrees Kevin Griffin, an IT advisor at Falco Enterprises and former CIO of GE Capital, adding that commitment to training is seen by employees as an investment in their worth and a powerful incentive to stay at the company.

“Investing in your employees’ education can help retain talent and intellectual property at a time when there’s stiff competition for both,” says Griffin. “The need for new skill sets and evolving roles are in demand at rapidly growing rate, so putting someone on a career path that doesn’t have any room to develop is not only a career-limiting move for the employee, but a business-limiting move for the company.”

Williams recently had two employees move nearly 2,000 miles away from Red Hat’s headquarters but keep their jobs anyway. “One way we’re retaining people is to let them say remote; we’re focusing on flexibility,” he says.

Employers in general will have to adopt that attitude if they want to keep their workers, experts say.

“The pandemic demonstrated that long-term remote work is possible,” says John Dooney, an HR knowledge advisor with the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). “From a recruitment and retention perspective providing increased flexibility for work hours and location of work help increase employee satisfaction, which leads to retention, along with increasing an employer’s competitiveness and attraction to land top talent.”

Williams says widescale remote work also means all employers are competing with everyone else, including the tech giants, so “salaries are adjusting to the highest bidders.”

That has IT leaders reviewing pay scales to ensure they’re as competitive as needed to retain talent, HR specialists say, adding that loyal workers expect to be rewarded for staying — and not feel like all the bonus pay is going only to new workers.

Williams says he regularly reviews existing workers’ pay to ensure it’s fair, competitive, and equitable throughout his organization, “ensuring that each individual is being paid for the role they’re in separate from any individual attribute unique to them.”

Pay, though, is only part of the equation, he and others stress. “Compensation, benefits, work environment, opportunities for development, rewards designs all matter,” Parsons says. “For example, in Silicon Valley, if a highly talented tech employee isn’t fully satisfied, he or she can merely walk across the street for a new and better opportunity. This is particularly true in a virtual world, post-COVID, where there are no longer geographic restrictions.”

Know what your employees want and be prepared to meet them, experts say.

“It is fair to say that candidate expectations are changing,” Thostenson says. “For instance, people are looking for organizations that can provide flexibility in a way that meets their individual needs and preferences. That is true whether they are the candidate or a current employee. If an organization is unable to provide flexibility, that could make it difficult to attract or retain talent.”

She says Liberty Mutual strives to “recognize that people are multidimensional — and we need to support the whole person — whether that’s through flexibility, a wide range of benefits, financial stability, or meaningful projects to keep them engaged.”

CIOs would do well to connect with their workers to update them on the organization and its direction and to get their feedback.

“CIOs may find that how their technical managers may have handled their interactions during the pandemic with technical employees can impact an employee’s view of the company and their role and job satisfaction,” Dooney says. “Because most employees leave their position because of satisfaction with their manager, if there have been past management issues or an employee felt the employer did a poor job of engaging and handling the workforce during the pandemic, they may be more likely to leave.”

He adds: “Employers may want to conduct stay interviews with employees to help understand any concerns an employee may have, and come up with ways to address those concerns.”

Meanwhile, Parsons suggests regular “state of the business” meetings, held quarterly or at least semi-annual with select or rotating senior executives conducting the sessions.

“All employees should be invited into sessions,” she says, noting there may need to be several sessions so the groups aren’t too large. “Tech people want to know what is going on with strategy, competition, the financials, and the business outlook. Include them and ask for their ideas. They appreciate feeling like partners in the enterprise.”

Another approach is to use an employee polling tool to get the pulse of staff’s attitudes to their work and the organization’s overall vision.

Organizations have incredible amounts of employee data available that they can use to identify who’s most likely to leave, why they might jump ship, and then take steps to prevent that, says Dave Weisbeck, CSO at workforce analytics software firm Visier.

“I stumbled upon this Glassdoor survey that calls out January as the month when more employees are likely to leave,” says Weisbeck. “But contrary to that survey finding, a lot of the data from our own clients shows that’s not necessarily true. We looked across all of our data — about a million employees — and what we’ve found is a very clear pattern on a quarterly basis, and Q3 is the biggest quarter for resignations.”

Why is that? From the data, Weisbeck says Visier’s team extrapolated that the timing of these resignations isn’t necessarily defined by the calendar but around internal processes and structures such as bonus payments. 

“People are thinking of this like, ‘Okay, I received my bonus and now I can leave,’ not ‘Oh, it’s a New Year, time for a new job,’” Weisbeck says. “Since many organizations time their bonuses to hit around Christmas and the end-of-year holiday season, it makes sense to see the January exodus. The pay and bonuses — or lack thereof — aren’t the reason they’re leaving; often times they have decided to leave months before but have hung on until they receive this money.”

Looking more closely at the data can help uncover patterns like this, potentially contradicting conventional wisdom, he says. AI and machine learning can help identify and address these issues before they lead to attrition and turnover.

“Commute time, for example, isn’t as big a factor in people’s engagement, happiness and their chances of leaving a job as distance to family,” Weisbeck says. “If your commute is an hour and a half each way and you have a family at home, you’re not necessarily dissatisfied with the commute; it’s the time you’re not spending with your family. So, organizations could add more flex time. Remote work opportunities. Anything that could help address that pain point.”

Of course, sometimes turnover is inevitable, so organizations must be prepared to lose top talent.

“It’s difficult when we lose someone who’s a rock star,” Pickett says. “But that’s one of the things you have to be prepared for. Especially in the IT industry, it’s so competitive — but it’s also healthy. You don’t want someone who doesn’t want to be there anymore.”

Here, succession planning can be key — especially for high level or hard-to-hire positions. So too can maintaining a high profile.

“Be active in universities, tech organizations, professional organizations, local chambers, written publications, symposiums, and the like,” Parsons says. “Have a strong — positive — presence. Be visible and become the employer of choice.”