Human Resources: The Company is Addressing Engineering Management Workforce Challenges, but Additional Work Remains

Our objective for this report was to assess the company’s efforts to address challenges in recruiting and retaining skilled engineering managers as it recovers from the pandemic and builds for the future. We found that the company is fully aware of the difficulties of recruiting and retaining skilled engineering managers in today’s labor market and has taken steps to address them. These steps include establishing meaningful pay differences between managers and subordinates, benchmarking management compensation with market rates, increasing salaries for field engineers, and offering one-time bonuses to entice agreement employees to move into management positions. In addition, the company recently commissioned a compensation analysis that will benchmark its salaries and determine appropriate rates for management positions company-wide. The analysis, scheduled to be completed this summer, is the first such review since 2014. We also found that the company has additional opportunities to build on these efforts, to include codifying existing policies on compensation and using workforce data to assess the effectiveness of its recruitment and retention effort for engineering managers. To address the report’s findings, we recommended that the company 1) establish formal compensation policies that define a schedule for regularly conducting analyses to identify whether the company is offering market-competitive salaries and communicate the policy to all relevant parties, 2) routinely analyze common workforce metrics such as employee turnover and share the metrics with relevant departments through existing workforce management tools, and 3) Use the common workforce metrics to assess the effectiveness of recent efforts to address compensation or work-life balance issues and determine whether further adjustments are needed.