The Great Resignation and Retooling of Tech Culture 

Recently, Wired published an insightful dissection of the difficulties tech companies face in order to retain talent. More perks, paying for interviews, and generally going above and beyond to hire people will, unfortunately, impact a company’s culture. Sadly, this could bring more “ninja” and “assassin” hires than the long-term stability of employees who can grow and add value to companies. 

This is particularly true for technology and healthcare enterprises.  

Healthtech is rapidly evolving, partially due to COVID-19 triggering an advancement in multiple fields: a growing need for remote patient monitoring, an increase in a number of home devices, incredible advancement in practical implementations of Artificial Intelligence, and shortened development cycles because of this increased focus on digital applications. Fifteen years ago, 10-15% of patient data was in a digital format. Today, 98% of new patient data is digital.  

In this new normal when digital opportunities abound, Health and MedTech companies face three new challenges:

1. De-risking new product ideas and launches. The need to rapidly test, build, and scale products while mitigating risk is essential.  
2. The skillsets needed to support new initiatives, such as embedded AI-based patient pathways or provider insights, are highly specialized. Talents with these kinds of skill sets are even harder to hire.
3. The ability to continually evolve. It’s not enough to transform an enterprise, but continually grow as technologies continue to advance. 

Why hard-to-find tech talent changes the relationship paradigm in tech culture 

My entrepreneurial experiences have taught me that if you chase a new hire too hard, you introduce risks that employees will join the company purely for transactional reasons and potentially less because they believe in the company’s vision and success. Those hires accomplish their tasks as well as initiatives, projects, goals, and department operations. However, their commitment may be fleeting and decoupled from the belief in a joint purpose if they are purely there for compensation. This ultimately affects the culture of the company, big or small, and can introduce culture debt. 

Culture debt can create a range of unintended consequences, including PR issues, morale issues, consumer confidence issues, legal liability, and retention. The cost of cultural onboarding through training and aligning is an investment of itself. This is on top of developing technical competencies and aligning with delivery standards, which are necessary to avoid technical debt. Consequently, cultural debt may eventually cause a serious domino effect that can kill your organization.  

The alternative: a new paradigm of bringing in external specialized teams that scale

Instead of traditional outsourcing, vendors, and consultants, bring in a specialized team who are experienced, ready to perform, and can better meet the needs of growing organizations. Successful teams have the following key characteristics: 

1. They operate well together, both with partners and organizations. If the incoming teams don’t iterate well, there is a risk of friction and worse outcomes. Only experienced teams with solid processes can achieve this. 
2. They are experts in their field. Talents with domain expertise provide technical ramp-up in the knowledge and experience in specific industries and projects, which further minimizes learning curves and adds a better perspective for building and launching products. 
3. They feel true ownership over the product they are building as well as the alignment with the organization’s vision and success. Successful teams don’t feel like the end of a phase is the end of a project. They truly want to see their client succeed in their business efforts. 

Not many teams meet all the three criteria above. To be able to build and unleash the power of transformational teams, product, research, and engineering leaders should consider creating a strategy on how to bring in talents with these three key attributes.  

Let’s talk! 

If you wish to discuss how to build strong teams that help deliver new products, innovations, and scale, I am more than curious to hear your thoughts. If you’re looking for a partner, a team of domain experts, and thought leaders to help you bring your product to life, reach out to us. We’re here to guide you from ideation to production. 

Connect with me on LinkedIn or contact me at sava.marinkovich@htecgroup.com.