Employee Self-Leadership and Technical Support Retention
By Kurt D. Kirstein, Ed.D.

In the first article in this series, I described a recent study I conducted to determine if there was a relationship between a set of specific leadership qualities and employee retention. The goal of this study was to identify specific actions that support team managers could take that had been shown to have a relationship with higher rates of employee retention.

This article, the third of three, discusses the relationship between two self-leadership qualities and rates of staff retention in technical support. Different from standard management or leadership positions that are granted by title and position, self-leadership is the act of identifying a situation that calls for leadership and assuming the leadership role without having to be told to do so. It’s resisting the temptation to let problems “wait for managers”. It’s the practice of exerting one’s influence and leadership to take independent action for the good of the department.

The goal of including self-leadership in this study was to determine if, in an environment where employees were allowed to, and even encouraged to, assume leadership roles, employee retention rates are higher. In this study, two aspects of self-leadership were found to be positively correlated with employee retention. These were:

• Ensuring that employees have tasks that challenge them
• Intrinsic motivation

This article also describes additional strategies that were proven in practice by support managers to have a positive impact on employee retention.

Challenging tasks

For employees to feel more connected to their jobs and their departments, they need to be assigned tasks that they feel are relevant, important, and challenging. In technical support, there are many opportunities for challenging tasks as long as the problems employees are asked to solve do not become mundane. Just as there are varying levels of employee skills, there needs to be varying levels of tasks and challenges. The technical support leader needs to ensure that the match between his or her employees’ skills and the tasks assigned are correct.

For the retention study, the distribution of responses indicated that the support leaders assigned challenging tasks most of the time with only five responses indicating that the manager always assigned challenging tasks. The results show a moderate, positive relationship between task assignment and employee retention which supports the need to make sure that technical support employees have tasks that are achievable without being too simplistic or overly complex. Simplistic tasks will miss the mark as a motivator and tasks that are too complex may frustrate the employee and prove to be counterproductive.

In the SSPA Research Top Talent for Service and Support industry study, challenging job responsibilities rated highly as motivators for those considered top performers in their organizations.

Intrinsic motivation

In an organization that encourages employee self-leadership, it’s more common to find employees who are motivated by intrinsic factors than they are by pay or benefits. This is because these employees feel a stronger sense of ownership for the success of the organization. Thus, they tend to be more motivated by things such as the successful completion of a goal than they are by a higher salary or bonuses. The intrinsic motivation question was included in the survey to determine how common such motivation was among support employees and to determine if there was a relationship between intrinsic motivation and employee retention.

The distribution of the responses suggests that, in most cases, managers feel that employees are motivated intrinsically more often than not; meaning that success toward a goal was more motivating than the compensation received for the effort put into the goal. The correlation from the survey shows a positive relationship between intrinsic motivation and employee retention with the higher retention respondents showing a slightly stronger relationship. This underscores the importance of ensuring that employees have tasks that will motivate them, that they have the opportunity to be part of the process of setting goals and objectives for the department, and that they get to share in its successes when those objectives are achieved. Sharing in the success becomes the motivation to set and achieve even more challenging goals.

Additional proven strategies

At the end of the survey, there was a final question that was intended to solicit ideas or strategies from support leaders that they had proven through practice to be effective in retaining their employees. The question on the survey was: “Can you list or describe strategies that you have employed in your team/department that have been successful in reducing employee turnover?”

Many of the responses supported the leadership qualities described in this article series and offered a few more. The most common suggestion was to “empower employees” which included the need to give them ownership of issues and customer relationships, responsibility for customer satisfaction, and a chance to participate in making important decisions that would impact the department. Another common suggestion was job diversification or finding important tasks for support people to do that did not center on the day-to-day support activities that were the focus of their jobs. Several respondents suggested that it was important to respect, trust, and challenge employees.

Many recommendations had to do with communication. Two related strategies that were suggested repeatedly were the need to listen consistently to employees as well as the need to offer them feedback about their performance. Additionally, respondents felt that it was important to create a career pathway so that support employees knew what it would take to be promoted and felt like they had the power to take independent, proactive steps to get there. They also felt it was important to focus on vision, objectives, and values. Finally, several respondents suggested the use of self-sufficient teams, regular employee recognition, and activities that kept the job and the workplace light and fun.

The Employee Retention Study

The three articles in this series were drawn from a year-long study of technical support retention, the results of which are posted on the web at www.retainemployees.org .

Included on this site are a description of the study, the research results, a description of a manager’s workshops based on what was learned from the study, and a set of materials that can be used in a manager’s workshop on employee retention. This site also contains a substantial reading list that can be used to supplement the foundational knowledge that the study was based on as well as the workshop that was its ultimate goal.

More information on hiring, developing, and retaining the best is available in SSPA Research’s Top Talent for Service and Support industry study. Non-SSPA companies can purchase a copy of this in-depth study by contacting John South, Director of Membership Development, jsouth@thesspa.com, or 858-674-5491.

Kurt Kirstein has 17 years experience working in technical support, mainly in telecommunications and biotech companies, with the past 12 years in leadership positions. Over the past 5 years, he’s managed the customer services and training group for a small biotechnical company. He earned his bachelor's degree in computer science at The Evergreen State College and holds a master's degree from Seattle University in adult education, and training and a doctorate in organizational leadership from Nova Southeastern University.