Behavioural and organisational factors involved in the turnover of high tech professionals

One of the most critical issues facing managers of high tech companies is keeping their technical employees satisfied and trying to prevent a rapid staff turnover. The shortage of good quality technical people in high tech companies creates a high demand for their skills. This makes it easy for them to change employers and more important for companies to provide working conditions which are attractive enough to keep their technical staff. The managerial problem is to know what are the critical organisational and job features that affect the desire to stay in or leave a company. This commentary provides some insight into this issue. Two main areas are covered; the first is the reasons why technical employees would leave their present company; the second looks at factors influencing the length of time they expect to stay in their present company.The findings presented form part of a much larger study on the motivation of high tech software professionals. The present commentary is based on the preliminary questionnaire results of 302 people from 7 high tech software companies, 3 small companies with less than 50 employees, 3 medium size companies with between 150-200 employees and 1 large company with over 2, 000 employees in total.