Top 10 retention tactics

Turnover at Airborne Express' Information Technology Services (ITS) group in Seattle dropped 4% in one year after the company shifted from staggered salary reviews on employee anniversaries to an annual departmentwide review period, says Lisa Reinitz, recruiting manager. "By doing it all at once, we can be sure increases are done fairly," she explains.

It also helps to put everyone's salary in context. "You can lose several people over one (raise) if the salary is too high," says Eileen Cassini, director of IT services at hotel and casino chain Harrah's Entertainment Inc. in Memphis.

Bob Taylor, a 12-year veteran at Charles Schwab & Co. in San Francisco, was considering leaving the company last December. He needed "to change things and get charged up about work again," he says. So, his boss allowed him to invent a new job.

Taylor devised a position combining his technology and business skills, becoming an organizational troubleshooter. "The key to my staying was to innovate my own job," says Taylor, now vice president of the mobile trading project at Schwab's Electronic Brokerage group. "To energize someone, let them work on what they absolutely love."

"I've never been in a meeting where someone put something on the table and people scoffed," Taylor says. "And, I've come up with some wacky things." Four years ago, Taylor led a project to develop a mobile phone for Schwab traders. They built the infrastructure, the software and the phone itself, but never got past beta tests because the traders "didn't like the big clunky phones," Taylor says.

"But I'm still here, and our work spawned the wireless initiative we have now."

Contact with top executives builds pride. At Bertelsmann Music Group in New York, former CIO Scott Dinsdale would ask the CEO to have a sit-down with his end-user support staff. "People in that position usually wouldn't expect that," says Dinsdale, now executive vice president and chief technology officer at online music site FirstLook.com in Los Angeles.

"You can be in a horrific (company) and walk into IT and see happy people laughing and whistling while they work," Stephenson says. "That flows out of departmental leadership." Give everyone a desk toy. Throw on-the-job parties. Airborne's ITS group springs for ice cream sundaes when it makes 99.98% availability on its global mainframe, Reinitz says. It may sound trivial, but it's often the little things that count for a lot.

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