Investing in Your Software Engineers: Increase Retention and Accelerate Employee Contributions

When the office struggled to hire senior engineers, they decided to shift their focus to hires with 0-3 years of experience. With that came the need to invest in those new hires to accomplish key goals:

• Increase familiarity and engagement between teams, especially for new hires who were joining small teams.

• Accelerate employee contributions; no longer assuming it would take 6 months for a new hire to contribute at the same level as their peers.

• Build a deeper understanding of the company and what a long-term career looks like.

To meet that need, I designed a one-hour session, every other week called Boulder Outfitters.

The sessions rotated through three primary categories: social, professional development, and organizational education, ensuring every category was addressed regularly. If I were to recommend this program today, I would insist on weekly sessions for all new hires for 3 months minimum. After the required time in the program, new hires could graduate out of the group (and be celebrated for doing so). In practice, attendees stayed beyond the required time by 50-100% due to the value it provided.

Social Sessions:

• Board games

• Peer Walk

• Mentor Walk

• Escape Room (in office)

These sessions were about building relationships between members. While board games were self-explanatory, peer walks sometimes required a helping hand to establish a conversation. Each member was provided a card with a conversation starter question they could pull out if they needed it. Most of the time, they didn't need it, but having it provided some comfort and confidence.

Professional Development Sessions:

• Communication (Engaging with Other People's Time)

• Code Reviews (Best Practices & Demo Sessions)

• Understanding and Creating JIRA Issues

• SMART Goals

• How to Run a Meeting

• Test Driven Development

• Refactoring (Case Study and Best Practices)

• Self-Evaluations

• Writing Secure Code

• Tips & Tricks presented by members (e.g. VS Code Shortcuts)

• Pair Programming and its Variants

Some of these sessions were created and presented by members who were new hires, but also wanted to share skills from their own career experience!

Organizational Education:

• Path to Promotion (Software Engineer II & 10+ Years, Interviews)

• Big Processes (How Big Projects are Discovered/Defined)

• Six Working Geniuses

• A Lens on X Team (Learning About Other Teams in the Org)

• Finding Answers (Outside of Closest Circle of Team(s))

• Investing in Future You (Retirement, Vesting, etc)

Many of these sessions were interviews facilitated by me, to break assumptions like "us and them" in large organizations as well as make it clear that most people's career paths are windy and unexpected, but always driven by one's desires and clear communication about what they want (when they discover what that is).

Sessions were less than 30% presentations, and when possible, a workshop approach was used to encourage high engagement of the group and uncover the answers through leading questions.

There is a lot more I could say about the how of running these sessions, but it's most critical to consider the value of running these sessions. The long-term effect of this program was an employee retention rate that was half the company average, and 25% of the national average. It also accelerated employee onboarding by 70-90%.

If you've got questions, I'd love to hear them. If you would like to set this up at your company and want more active guidance, reach out as well; there is so much more to offer.