YouTube offering bonuses to keep talent away from rivals, says WSJ

Google is throwing money at its YouTube stars to keep them away from a site that hasn’t even launched yet, according to the WSJ. Vessel, created by Hulu exec Jason Kilar, has offered some YouTube artists exclusive and lucrative deals to attract attention to its launch later this year. Other sites like Facebook and Crackle have also reportedly been poaching YouTube stars. The “broadcast yourself” site leans on talent like style coach Michelle Phan and comedian Colleen Ballinger (as Miranda Sings, above) to keep loyal channels fans engaged. But Phan, who had an early look at Vessel, called it “stunning,” and others have said that they were offered serious money for exclusive deals. Artists that stay loyal are making out better, though — on top of bonuses, YouTube has been offering rich funding deals to help select stars create new channels.

via YouTube offering bonuses to keep talent away from rivals, says WSJ.

YouTube offering bonuses to keep talent away from rivals, says WSJ

Top CIOs Keep Their Attention on Staff Retention

Three CIOs discuss their strategies for keeping top tech on staff by focusing on opportunity, mobility and purpose.

1. Match Skills To Future Opportunities

Dennis Hodges, CIO, Inteva Products: When we acquired a fellow automotive supplier in 2011, we doubled our business and tripled our IT headcount. Our goal was to keep everyone, but building a blended IT family is challenging. The key was being up-front about where we were headed and what skill sets would get us there.

We mapped out everyone’s skills and showed them how they matched up with roles in the new organization. We lost a couple of very technical people who wanted to work with an ERP system we did not plan to keep, but we were able to retain most employees.

Here in Detroit, where huge companies like GM are hiring, and in Bangalore, India, where we also have IT operations, turnover is always a risk. We don’t have big money to throw at people, but we do have big opportunities. Some CIOs say you shouldn’t train employees too soon: They’ll get too good too fast, and they’ll leave.

I disagree. I want my employees to work on interesting things from the beginning. We’ve got young people who arrived without much experience now running major projects. They couldn’t do that at GM. If they do leave, they’ll leave on good terms and will advocate for us in the market.

2. Give People a Mission 

Anil Cheriyan, CIO, SunTrust Bank: We started a transformation two years ago and quickly realized that the skills we had were not necessarily the skills we needed. Fundamentally, we were looking for “builders” who were interested in fast-paced change. Also during this period, it has been critical to retain our most valuable employees. We’ve sought to achieve this balance by driving cultural change, such as switching from a command-and-control culture to a more collaborative organization. We also make a point of listening to our employees, whether it’s via our enterprise-wide innovation hubs, where teammates propose ideas, or through our engagement surveys. It’s critical to keep your ears open when making a change.

The IT job market in Atlanta has become hot, with companies like GM, State Farm and Wipro setting up tech centers here, while in India, it’s been hot for over a decade. And certain skills are in demand, such as software-as-a-service, workflow and imaging experience. In the past, we may have gone to other banks to find IT people, but we’re now looking to other sources, like Google or Facebook, for talent. In the end, what keeps people here is their connection to our purpose. Are you here to build, or are you here to operate?

3. Allow Unlimited Mobility

Alison Dack, Vice President of IT & CIO, FedEx Express Asia Pacific: The key to low turnover is creating an environment that makes it easy for employees to want to stay. It’s not all about compensation—people want to be successful and want their contributions recognized. For instance, we don’t limit career progression.

We have a tradition of training up our team from junior positions to management levels and offering lateral moves into new areas. At our Asia Pacific headquarters in Hong Kong, a quarter of our senior managers are locals who started in front-line roles such as couriers.

We have a long tradition of developing our employees to their highest potential and of hiring first-line managers from within employee ranks. Because we make lifelong learning a priority, we can readily promote from within. Each hourly employee receives 50 hours of training annually, while management and professional staffers get 40 hours. Corporate responsibility to local communities is another increasingly important retention tool, and we maintain strong relationships in the areas where we work.

Finally, we encourage open, two-way communication, including the opportunity to communicate with management about all aspects of the company; guaranteed fair treatment, in which employees can have their concerns heard and evaluated; leadership and communication effectiveness surveys; and an open-door policy among executives and managers. Successful retention comes down to making sure employees know they are valued.

via Top CIOs Keep Their Attention on Staff Retention | CIO.

Top CIOs Keep Their Attention on Staff Retention

Great Perks even at smaller companies

One of the many ways companies keep their hard-won employees around is by keeping them happy through health. Free gym memberships, on-site health clinics, and therapy sessions to combat stress are all a part of the perk parlance for competitive corporations. Well-known names like Google, SAS, Nike, Accenture are a few who pull out the stops, but this HR angle isn’t just for the big guys.

Smaller companies, too, feel the need to ensure employee satisfaction. This was evident from our ‘Tech Bites’ visit with the productivity software company, Asana. The company designs team-oriented product management software which aims to displace clunky and seemingly antiquated email systems. It takes its name from the Sanskrit word for a seated yoga pose (you guessed right: employees get free 1-on-1 yoga sessions), but you won’t find many employees seated at the stylishly minimal SoMa office. Each hire receives a $10,000 stipend to build their ideal standing desk. So, how exactly do you eat over your keyboard standing up, you ask? You don’t. Asana was mindful enough to provide their people with a communal area with banquet-style seating and two chefs to conjure up healthy, succulent dishes.

During our visit with chefs Donnie Thompson and Kim Pak, they busied themselves in the full kitchen downstairs, preparing broiled sea bass filets with grilled asparagus and Israeli couscous. The menus they design for Asana include items and ingredients aimed to keep the staff active and alert with a late afternoon snack (smoothies are popular) that avoids carbohydrate-induced drowsiness. Special dietary needs are provided for so vegans, celiacs, or paleo-dieters can get what they want and need without a fuss or a trip out of the office. There’s plenty of local, organic, and ethically-raised and -harvested ingredients for everyone.

Take a look for yourself. The cooking and plating are enough to make you counterfeit employee badges for all your friends.

via Tech Bites: Asana – Food Focused on Productivity and Employee Health – Forbes.

Great Perks even at smaller companies

10 Ways To Lose Your Best Employees

In the course of writing The Talent Mandate, I spoke with a prominent business school professor who told me that no corporate function lags behind today so dramatically as talent. He sees improvements and innovations in every area except in the vital matter of managing people. That’s astonishing–and it’s also lunacy at a time when people costs tend to be upward of 50 percent of a company’s expenses. What could be more vital than talent to the bottom line? And yet the people in our employ continue to be neglected, taking a backseat to the various other matters that occupy our workdays.

Want to unload your most dynamic, highest-potential employees? Keep doing these things:

1. Hire for the past, not the future.

Choose talent based on what worked before, not on where the category is heading. Emphasize candidates’ narrow former experience over a more generalized, nimble agility to adapt to a fast-changing world.

2. Downplay values and mission.

Send the signal that anything goes in pursuit of profit, making employees guess about what choices are truly acceptable. Fail to spend time articulating to your workers why they come to work every day and how the greater community benefits.

3. Bungle the teams.

Avoid mixing generations and skill sets, instead grouping like with like and producing stale and predictable solutions that excite nobody—but might be safer.

4. Place jerks in management.

Reward the old-fashioned, autocratic style that stifles unorthodox, creative thinking and feels threatened by youth and dynamism.

5. Measure hours, not results.

Keep an expensive cadre of stern enforcers busy with policing everybody. Don’t trust your talent to use their time wisely. Crack down on social media. Forbid personal activities during nine to five, even as you expect work to be conducted over the weekend.

6. Promote people straight up the ladder.

Fail to give them exposure to different parts of the business through lateral moves. Thereby give them the sensation of being narrowed over time, not broadened.

7. Leave talent to HR.

Expect the staff who must deal with the minutiae of personnel issues also to be visionaries in hiring. Detach the C-suite from talent recruitment and retention; it’s not their department.

8. Hoard information.

Keep decision-making securely ensconced in the airless bunker of the executive wing. Avoid empowering mid-tier employees lest they suddenly become entrepreneurial and unpredictable.

9. Don’t bother with training.

It’s costly, and employees will probably jump ship with their new skills. Instead, have your workers do the same tasks over and over in the same way.

10. Hire outsiders.

After you have failed to train and develop your best people, follow it all up by stifling their ambitions for increased responsibility. When they come to you and say, “I’m leaving,” express astonishment and outrage.

If this sounds at all familiar, you’d better hope your competitors are following the same game plan.

via 10 Ways To Lose Your Best Employees | Fast Company | Business + Innovation.

10 Ways To Lose Your Best Employees

Goldman Sachs has a problematic plan to keep its tech talent around

Believe it or not, Goldman Sachs is on Github. For all you non-programmers out there, Github is a platform that allows developers to write software online and, frequently, to share it with others. For banks—which have typically kept technology behind closed doors—that’s an alien concept. And for Goldman, being on Github is even stranger.

In 2009, Goldman programmer Serge Aleynikov was arrested by the FBI and convicted of stealing proprietary Goldman Sach software (he is currently free on appeal). Aleynikov argued that the code he took was primarily open-source, along with bits of proprietary Goldman Sachs code that he kept for documentation purposes. As described in a Vanity Fair article about Aleynikov’s case, Goldman’s stance toward the open source world was anything but friendly:

Serge quickly discovered, to his surprise, that Goldman had a one-way relationship with open source. They took huge amounts of free software off the Web, but they did not return it after he had modified it, even when his modifications were very slight and of general rather than financial use. … Open source was an idea that depended on collaboration and sharing, and Serge had a long history of contributing to it. He didn’t fully understand how Goldman could think it was O.K. to benefit so greatly from the work of others and then behave so selfishly toward them.

Evidently, that thinking has changed in the last year and a half. Goldman’s technologists have been touting something called GS Collections, a collection of libraries to aid Java programmers in coding, which they’ve opened up to the world on Github. The software is designed to help businesses building software applications; through Github, outside coders can play with the software and contribute their own improvements.

Playing up its open-source credentials is also one way the firm plans to draw tech talent. The bank has found itself competing for new recruits with the likes of Google and Facebook, which embrace the open source ethic embodied by Github. And convincing employees that they’re a part of something bigger could make it more palatable to join an industry that arguably caused the last global meltdown.

“We use open source software in many of our operations,” Mike Marzo, a tech fellow at Goldman, told an audience of Java programmers last week. “We have benefited from the work of others and we’d like to give something back.”

This effort only goes so far. Goldman Sachs isn’t willing to share its trading technology or any other software it considers proprietary. Goldman Sachs also has private systems meant to foster greater collaboration between its own programmers, but the fruits of that collaboration will stay strictly within the firm.

via Goldman Sachs has a problematic plan to keep its tech talent around – Quartz.

Goldman Sachs has a problematic plan to keep its tech talent around