How happy are your staff? With talk of recession and job losses in the air, it is easy to assume that people will simply be happy to still have a job. Who knows, there may even be one or two who you would not mind losing if P45s have to be handed out.

But as this month’s cover story shows, that sort of thinking is dangerous. When times are tough, it is the most talented people that will pull companies through. And with no shortage of doom and gloom around, it is inevitable for employees to start feeling jittery. Maybe they have already begun to spruce up their CVs and are taking a keener interest in the jobs that are out there.

It is invariably your star performers who will find more opportunities open to them in the job market. So this is most definitely the wrong time to be forgetting about retention strategies.

It is also easy to assume that staff can be cajoled into staying put through offers of pay rises ­ but with purse strings tight, this is not a great option. It is also plain wrong. Evidence suggests that throwing money at the problem will not help: loyalty is not inspired through the pay packet, the factors that influence it are more nuanced than that.

There is evidence that firms are becoming more creative in the way they reward IT staff. Tech startups are perhaps the most imaginative, and with good reason. These are firms scrabbling to establish themselves via technical innovation; they know the value of their IT staff.

That said, it is not the liberal deployment of scatter cushions nor complimentary granola bars that impresses. It is the attitude that underpins their staff retention strategies ­ understanding their colleagues’ human needs and motivations. This manifests itself in flexible working conditions, finely-tuned personal development programmes and a management culture that recognises achievements.

This is further explored in the opinion article on page six. In it, an organisational psychologist explains how personality profiling has revealed the types of people attracted to IT, and the consequences this has when it comes to managing them.
Whether or not psychological profiling is a useful recruitment or retention tool, is a hugely controversial area. Deciding who your IT stars are by personality type could be fraught with danger. The profiling is most useful as a personal development tool; it reminds us of our own strengths and weaknesses, and encourages us to think about how others respond to us.

That could pay dividends when we are thinking about how to inspire our key personnel