Pancho Davis
Director of Human Resources
Rackspace Hosting
With talented technical employees thin on the ground, and your business expanding, can you tell us a bit about how your Open Cloud Academy has helped you source the right talent for your brand? And how have your current employees benefitted from the Academy?
What I believe we have done well as a company is ‘build’ talent where there are scarce resources in the market. We have done this in the past when we struggled to find System Administrators and we continue to do this with OCA. Open Cloud Academy is program that has been funded in conjunction with the City of San Antonio to help create a pool of technical talent in the city. The program is not necessarily meant to train Rackers, but we have hired roughly 50 people or close to 50% of the OCA graduates so far.
As director of HR what would you say is your biggest challenge at the moment? And, looking ahead, what do you think are going to be the biggest drivers of employee engagement in 5 years time?
At the moment, our biggest challenge is finding and keeping great talent. This industry is incredibly fast moving and there is always something ‘newer and cooler’ to be working on and with technical talent in such short supply, one of our biggest objectives is to be an employer of choice for the best technical employees. This is why creating a great culture and having engaged employees is critically important. There are always companies willing to pay more money, companies with better benefits, etc., but hopefully Rackers believe in our mission are actively engaged in our culture and that, more than anything is what keeps them here. As far as trends for the future, having the ability to be more flexible around the when and where you work could be a big driver for engagement.
Managers account for at least 70% of variance in employee engagement scores across business units, according to Gallup – and bad managers can bring down a business. What key qualities do you think managers need to engage their teams, so a company’s employees are motivated to go above beyond, reaping rewards for the business?
There are a number of qualities that make a manger great and help them engage their team members and as I mentioned before, it probably depends on the employee, but two that are key at Rackspace are communication and coaching. Full Disclosure and Transparency is one of our Core Values and Rackers want to know what is going on in the business and want their managers to communicate with them on a regular basis. Along with communication, Rackers want their managers to partner with them and coach them as they progress in their careers. This coaching can take the form of career development or it can be performance feedback. As much as anything, Rackers want to feel like they are growing and developing in their careers and want to be successful. Without good, continuous feedback and coaching this can be difficult to achieve.
