Retaining Tech Talent Isn’t Just
About Money. Here Are 5 Tips to Keep Your Best Team Members
When
the dust settles, only a small percentage of professionals leave their jobs
simply for more money.
EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1
Feb 5,
2026
I’ve been spending
considerable time this month in board sessions and compensation committee
meetings to deal with 2025 year-end bonuses and plans for 2026. Surprisingly,
there weren’t too many tough calls this time around, even though the year and
the “real” economy (as opposed to the stock market) were mixed blessings at
best, with plenty of curves and bumps along the way for millions of businesses.
In most of the cases
that I’ve had to deal with, the comp decisions seemed fairly clearcut. If the
team crushed it and beat their plan, the acknowledgment actions were obvious.
The formulas were applied and everyone was onboard with the resultant payments.
If the prior year’s operations were flat or a bust, there really wasn’t too
much to discuss, and not a lot of spare cash to disburse anyway. Math is math
in these meetings, and there’s a lot of resistance to moving the goal posts or
changing the metrics after the fact—even when the team tried its best and
worked really hard.
Some things every year
are simply outside of management’s control, as macro movements can have
material impacts on a company’s financials. You’re just as likely to catch a
wave and hit it big as you are to get kicked in the teeth in any given year,
especially with a demented moron in the White House. But that’s part of what
you sign up for as a new business builder. If you want the rainbow, you’ve got
to put up with the rain. The most reliable owners and operators are the ones
who make the best of things and handle whatever the world throws at them.
What’s relevant to the
future success of any given business has something—but never everything—to do
with money. The people issues which will
ultimately make or break the business are far more complex than just dollars
and cents issues. Money is what people without talent use to keep score. What
the people who really matter are looking for are new challenges, appropriate
support and resources, increased responsibility, and recognition for their
efforts and their accomplishments.
So, a significant amount
of the most critical conversations in these year-end meetings weren’t about
what people should be paid. They were all about non-financial strategies and
other effective methods to retain critical key players and especially how best
to hang on to specialized tech talent in a time when the world was beating down
the doors trying to steal them away.
We’re definitely in a AI hiring frenzy that reminds me of
the dot-com craziness of the late 1990s, when everyone wanted to leave their
jobs to start their own businesses and VCs were throwing money around like
confetti to back every insane idea, right up until March of 2000, when the
whole market crashed.
It’s important to
understand that even your most loyal and long-time tech team members are
subject to the pull of FOMO, as nobody wants to miss the latest gold rush or
give up a chance to help to invent the next big thing. It’s human nature, part
of every techie’s DNA, and only one of the many ways in which your tech
people’s enthusiasm, commitment and engagement can slowly slip away.
There are two
considerations that are central to the retention conversations and essential to
keep in mind. First, all the IT professionals can only really
play for a tie, dodge as many bullets as humanly possible, and pray that
nothing breaks. They get next-to-no credit when things are running smoothly but
they’re the first ones on the hot seat when things go south. You always intend to
compliment these folks but never seem to have the time or the interest in
making a special effort to do so. Recognition is a lever that costs you almost
nothing and is often underused. Silent gratitude doesn’t help anyone. It’s also
worth noting that a huge portion of the IT work is directed at very boring
objectives, such as updating old processes without interrupting day-to-day
operations and inexpensively patching outdated code before it shuts down
completely.
Second, the buzz of
winning a big new client or customer or launching a new product wears off very
quickly, especially when you’re the one who has to implement the solution,
explain away some of the extra-zealous promises made by the sales team, and
fend off the client’s constant requests for added features and functionality on
the fly. There’s a reason that it costs 10 times the price of an application to
implement it. Every day is a grind, there’s no adrenaline rush, and there’s
really no finish line, because typical software development is one brief moment
of creation and a lifetime of maintenance.
Here are five ways to
help you hang on to your best people that have nothing to do with dollars.
1.
Make sure that you’re
helping your tech people keep their skills and training up to date. No one
wants to be left behind or be stuck in a rut maintaining the same old code or
simply one area or component of the entire system.
2.
If you don’t trust your
people to work hard and make smart decisions, they’re the wrong ones. Treat
them as accountable grownups and give them sufficient leeway and autonomy to
feel that they have some real ownership and investment in what they’re building.
Knowledge workers need to manage themselves. Managers need to set them up to
succeed. People don’t leave jobs; they leave poor managers.
3.
Create a professional environment that
supports thoughtful, creative work without interruptions and work plans that
are flexible and individual in terms of time, location, communications and
reporting. Talent is a package deal, and you’ve got to make room for all kinds
of people.
4.
No one wants to spend
their career in a cubicle. You need to build an advancement structure and a
career ladder within IT with increasing responsibilities and status which
doesn’t require your best people to move into management but rewards them for
“blooming in place” and succeeding without having to manage others.
5.
Get your best system
thinkers out in the field from time to time and connect them directly with key
customers so that they can see both the problems and pain points that need to
be addressed and also the positive results of their work. No one ever tells it
to you straighter than an actual customer.
Bottom line: when all
the dust settles and all the stories are vetted, only a small percentage of
serious professionals leave their work and their team members for more money or
better opportunities. They leave for other reasons, including the absence of
good reasons to stay, and their departures rarely come as a complete surprise
to the folks who work with them.
