Stop that 2-year employee churn

If you work in software engineering (and possibly lots of other businesses) then I am sure you have experienced what is often referred to as the “2-year churn” of people moving to other companies, this timeline will vary but seems to be around 18–36 months.

Can you stop it…… should you try?
There are 2 sides to this, and I’ll try and set out my experience with both:

1. You’re doing the recruiting: When recruiting, you often want someone who has worked at a few companies so that 2-year churn isn’t a bad thing, people learn new things at different companies and will bring more diverse experience to you when they join. So as a hiring manager, it’s not a bad thing, gone are the days when we all wanted someone who worked at one place for life. So here is a positive to that churn!
2. Stable Teams: You’re not hiring and have some great people working for you, now a few are starting to hit that 2–3 year point where they might want to move, I’ve known very senior managers who just expect and accept this; which I personally think is crazy!
   You have a team that works great, and you don’t want to lose any of them!
   Accept that you’ll never stop this, and in some ways, you want to allow it to happen to some degree to gain new experiences as people leave and new ones join.

BUT of course you want to limit this, recruitment is expensive, getting people up to speed takes time, and whenever there’s a significant change your team are going to fall back into “Storming”.

I’m already going to assume that you have a great working culture and are a place people enjoy working at even if you might not be the in the same league as Google or Netflix.

As well as working on having great ways of working and a fantastic culture you might still get hit by that churn, here are some ways you can improve that.

One of the most significant points is to think of the LONG TERM! Short term gains might mean longer-term losses as teams get bored, disengaged and end up leaving, so on the flip side shorter-term losses often lead to long term gains (more engaged and productive teams, higher retention, easier to recruit as word of mouth is a huge influence)

• Keep the work interesting: Make sure the features or projects the team get to work on are diverse, this might mean giving the team something totally different and may not be the fastest way to deliver it, but it’s going to be a lot cheaper and quicker than losing people. Always keep in mind that slight delays on projects can be better than having people be less engaged and leaving, it will always depend on the urgency of the project but if completely ignored you risk being slower as a business.
• Keep the tech challenging: This isn’t about always working with the newest/coolest tech that’s been out for a week but it is about allowing them time to experiment, run proofs of concepts and even try a new language (as long as it’s suitable) to deliver a project.
• Allow for secondments: If this means you might be a person down for 1–3 months and as long as its not at a critical time (In the last 9 months I’ve had 2 employees do a secondment, 1 was in the mobile team, and another was in the Data team, both of these were previously working on node.js backend Microservices)
• Make it simple to switch teams: Remove the idea of asking for managers approval to apply for open roles in other teams, let the employee apply and if successful move them over as quick as possible, if you don’t do this then they will just have to apply for roles outside of the business.
  Remember the 2 secondments above? They both actually moved, yes I then had to recruit, but they were much happier, and luckily they moved to teams that were very understaffed at the time so the business as a whole benefitted.
• Swaps: Make it well known that your company supports people swapping teams, this could be permanently or as secondments but let everyone know that if they can find a person to swap with, then it can happen within a short timeline (1–2 months)
• Where possible allow people to move even if there’s not a vacancy, the smaller the company then, the harder this is but if you can manage to do it, you’ll get benefits
• Changing role: Allow people to try totally different roles even if it’s part-time, could 2 people share an open position as they both want to try it out?

These are just some ideas, and not everything will work everywhere all of the time, but you can make these work in most places at least some of the time.
Maybe the ideas above don’t work for you, but they might lead you to think of some that do, please comment below if you have other similar ideas as this is by no means an exhaustive list and I’d love to hear about other good ways of doing this.