The real question is what enhances the software developer experience at your company? There is a direct answer to this question, but only methods you can use in order to retain top talent in this world that is moving at such a fast pace every day.
The overall costs of IT are rising year by year and have reached roughly $4 trillion only in 2021. In short, it only makes sense to try and make a great experience for your developers at your company.
7 ways to foster your developing team's experience
That is why in this article we will be showing you the 7 ways you can foster your developer's experience at your own company!
1. Set attainable goals
Prioritize your significant goals and make sure to set a time period when these goals should be achieved. When your team has goals, they will be motivated to work towards them and focus on creating new innovations to attain these goals.
You can try breaking these goals up into smaller ones, where every week or meeting, you will see the progress you and your team of developers have. According to a study, 14% of people who had goals were ten times more likely to be successful than those who didn't have any. In addition to this, this also counts for you and your team.
Setting a regular interval of meetings and checking progress each week will make your team of developers know they are getting closer to the finish line. Hence, they will get a feeling of fulfillment and stay hungry towards their goals.
2. Use employee benefits administration
Many people don't understand what the term 'employee benefits administration' is, but this term isn't as confusing as it may seem. It stands for the administration and management of any type of employee benefits program, which means the following:
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Creating an employee benefits program
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Choosing benefits packages
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Updating the different elements associated with an employee benefits programmer
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Taking care of all your documentation
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Informing your employees about their benefits
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Make sure that the employee benefits program follows your local regulations
The HR industry within a company takes care of the employee benefits administration. Companies will use the software most of the time to help them with administration benefits. Managing employee benefits can sometimes be challenging, but the software will make it easier and make sure the process becomes as easy as possible.
3. Give empowerment
People may never be right, but the software makes developers make the right decisions most of the time. It is important you give your developers the necessary credits they deserve and allow them to make decisions based on how they do their work.
Giving the credits to your developers will not only make them feel better but also motivate them to be more engaged within the projects they work on. According to research, only 15% of employees are engaged at a workplace, and one of the main reasons for this is credibility and empowerment.
Most managers who try to impose strategies of only telling developers what to do and acting like control freaks won't succeed with a team of developers. It is best to let them do their own work and give them their own space in order that they do it more effectively.
People will always feel impacted by their environment, so if you are giving positive energy, this is where you increase employee retention and the overall happiness of your developers.
4. Promote flexible working hours
Flexible working hours are a necessity when it comes to working with developers. Developers always have to be active and be ready to make any changes when needed. Thus, flexible working hours and remote working are in their favor.
According to a survey conducted by Airtasker, employees with flexible working hours have more productivity and work on average 1.4 days more every month than traditional working hours. Add these numbers up and that sums up to about 16 days more per year!
Let's be honest, not everyone likes the traditional 9-5 working hours, especially developers. Developers are always worrying about securing VPN connections, and servers that can drop at any time. If they aren't there to fix the problem at that very moment, it may cost your business a lot of time and money.
To ensure effective collaboration between the development team, you can make everyone agree on a certain time when a meeting should be held. It's important you find what works for your developers and not what works for you.
5. Offer opportunities for learning new skills
Offering opportunities for your developers to grow is one of the best things that can happen. Guess what happens when you don't do this? Your developers will stick to the same methods and get outdated soon enough. Whatever lacks innovation will fail over time.
Exposing your developers to new environments and skills encourage them to grow and become more proficient in what they do. Along the way to learning new skills, your developers will feel better about working for your company and even feel more motivated along the way.
6. Give your developers the best tools
Developers are all about innovation and in order for them to perform at the highest level, they need to also have the necessary tools. The main tools your developers need to have are software development tools and project management tools.
Software development tools
Software development tools are great for automating repetitive tasks that need to be done, and we all know that repetitive tasks consume a lot of our time. Developers don't have all the time in the world, and the last thing they want is to lose time. Along with that, automating repetitive tasks will help reduce operational costs.
Additionally, when using software development tools, your primary concern should be to choose the right tool for source code management, defect management, scalability, customization, and many other capabilities that come with other tools.
Project management tools
Many people may think that project management tools aren't necessary to use when you have tools for software development. However, this isn't necessarily true.
Project management tools give your development team access to writing codes and save time working on a project. A popular project management tool most developers use is Asana. Although there are many alternatives available in the market, you need to see what fits best with your development team.
7. Give feedback and support collaboration
Aside from all the other tips we gave you, feedback and communication are above all. It would help if you established a collaborative culture within your team from the beginning. Encourage all members to work together and to do so with maximum respect and kindness.
You have to be fully honest with your developers and give them the right feedback. Following up with continuous feedback makes the best teams and ensures that they all have the right synergy between each other. Collaborating with anger and anxiety is never the right solution, so avoid this at all costs. Anger, in general, is the worst emotion someone can experience within a workplace, so you don't want to be the one responsible for an angry employee.
To ensure you provide the right feedback, set up weekly or monthly performance evaluations that recommend developers where they can improve. Improvement always has space, so never think that you are performing at your maximum potential, especially when you are competing in the software industry that is super competitive.
Wrapping it up
Well, that's about it for this article. Hopefully, it has presented you with new ways to foster your developer's experience at the workplace. Remember, your developers are the most valuable assets in your company, so you must take good care of them.
This article goes into an in-depth review of how you can enhance their experience at the workplace. We recommend you carefully read through each section and see how you can implement these working methods at your company.
Use all the resources you have in order to ensure you provide the best experience for your developers. The world is moving at a fast pace, so the only way we can adapt and ensure effective collaboration is by working together and making sure we are all on the same page. Other than that, there is always room for innovations.