Your engineering team is crucial to improving R&D and innovation at your company. When team members don’t work together well or you don’t have a clear team leader, it can cause project delays or subpar work. Therefore, learning how to get the most potential out of each engineer and your team overall will certainly improve productivity and reduce costs.

Nowadays, it’s difficult to keep pace with constantly changing trends and technology; therefore, having a top-performing and specialized engineering team that strives for growth and meets your requirements is a must.

So, how can you get the most potential out of your engineers? How do you help them improve their performance and collaboration? And most importantly, how do you attract top talent? Below, we explain 4 ways to help you tackle these challenges.

1. Attract the engineers that your engineering team is missing

By creating a smart strategy, you can distinguish your company from your competitors and attract—and retain—highly-skilled and specialised engineers:

• Benefits are just as important as salary: Beyond salary there are promotions, personal growth, a career path, etc. Think about what kind of what kind of future you offer with your company or project: Do engineers have the possibility to work with mentors? Can they eventually be promoted to higher positions? Will you provide engineering trainings or team-building activities? Think about how to distinguish your company from your competitors in terms of education and training.
• Look for the right fit: New hires need to work well with the rest of your team, so don’t settle for pre-built teams (a common trend among traditional outsourcing companies). Make sure that you’re getting candidates with the exact skill set, experience, and values you need, and that they complement your existing team. Find highly-skilled engineers here!
• Give engineers a purpose: It’s the nature of engineers: they love challenges and learning how to do new things. They want to know what problems they’ll need overcome. In your job or project description, focus on the challenges that candidates will need to solve and how that can help them grow their own abilities.
• Work with an engineering outsourcing specialist: TechTeamz is the outsourced engineering solution that you have been looking for to guide you through the recruitment process and help you find your best candidate. We take care of all hiring and HR risks, while you still maintain project control and visibility.
• More: Read about more ways to compete with companies hiring engineers and set your company or project apart from the rest.

2. Identify potential leaders on your engineering team

You may not realise it, but your team might already have the leaders that you’ve been looking for. To identify potential leaders, focus on the individuals who regularly go beyond the standard “job description”, display an eagerness to learn and improve, and are great at managing workloads and collaborating.

• Quality over quantity: Top performers focus on meeting high-quality standards over just getting things done quickly. The people who can take an established timeline and exceed expectations are the ones to look out for.
• Skills development: They always strive to improve their skills. If a project is not engaging or challenging enough, they might not be able to demonstrate their abilities to the full extent. Make sure to ask each engineer about their interests and strengths, and find projects that match.
• Decision-makers: People who have the opportunity to make decisions are the ones who advance into leaders. With a little flexibility, room for risk, and following their intuition, you’ll be able to see new ideas and innovations come to life. This will improve their self-confidence.
• Desire for input: Top engineers want to know how they are performing by receiving regular feedback. This will motivate them to meet company standards and perform as expected. They will also feel comfortable sharing their own opinions and ideas.
• Self-direction: Leaders are curious and tend to perform their own research. They don’t need a supervisor or client constantly micromanaging them. They can manage the established timeline and break the work down into parts, doing their individual work where required and knowing which parts need to involve other team members.
• Work well under pressure: Engineers that have the most leadership potential will be able calmly analyse situations and work well under pressure, even when a deadline is near.
• Good people skills: They understand the value of nurturing relationships with their teammates, superiors, and the client, and they have a good professional relationship will all of them.

3. Foster new opportunities by creating a Talent Development Strategy

Once you’ve attracted and identified top performing engineers, you’ll need to nurture them into leaders by providing support and training. From the very start, it’s important to come up with a Talent Development Strategy, a strategy which enables you to build upon your engineers existing skills and identify new ones to help you achieve organizational objectives.

• Set company objectives: From a project or company perspective, determine your mission, vision, and goals. Make sure your engineering team understands all of these objectives and build a roadmap. If they internalize these objectives, the engineers will feel like they have a sense of purpose and understand what they need to do.
• Look for upskilling and reskilling opportunities: See which engineering skills are being utilized by your team right now and look for areas to expand. In the near future, you will no doubt need expertise in these in-demand engineering skills, so give your team opportunities to upskill in those areas.
• Provide different learning methods and trainings: You can use different training methods such as on-the-job learning, mentorship programs, coaching, e-learning or self-learning. No two people learn the same, so find out what works for each individual. Most importantly, create a company culture that embraces continuous learning and development.
• Evaluate and improve: To succeed, it’s important to periodically track data and measure it against performance goals. Reporting and feedback from employees on the measures that are being applied are essential to make improvements.

4. Improve collaboration to maximise your engineering team’s overall potential

When your team as a whole works efficiently together, you’ll get better and faster solutions to the challenges you’re trying to solve. Below, we discuss the fundamental of improving teamwork:

• Enhance Communication: Teach active listening and open-mindedness. Problems can be solved in many different ways, so engineers need to listen to their teammates ideas and consider proposals with an open mind.
• Value everyone on the team: Acknowledge and respect each team member’s skills and experience. Each person has different strengths, and recognizing and acknowledging that will improve confidence.
• Turn work into a game: Motivate your team and foster collaboration by introducing typical gamification features such as: customizable avatars, digital or real-world rewards, and/or leader boards.
• Be flexible: If your team members love their work and if they have flexibility to do it from anywhere and anytime, then they are more likely to be more productive. Remote work is also becoming popular among engineering teams. Discover remote teams best practices for engineers.
• Peer-to-peer learning: Instil a teaching mindset among your teammates, where each person is willing to teach the others about their strengths. Setting aside time to learn together will create comradery and support.

As you can see, it’s very possible to get the most potential out of your engineering team and the individuals that comprise it. All it takes is 4 simple steps: attract new talent, identify leaders, foster their talent, and improve team collaboration.  However, simply finding and hiring the right engineers can be a struggle in this day and age, where there is huge demand for expert engineers. At TechTeamz, we build worldclass teams for you in weeks, using our advanced sourcing and onboarding capabilities. Reach out to us and get started today!