By Chelsea Babin

When you have a work environment that top technical professionals love, they will flock to your company and stay for a long time, lengthening your average tenures and reducing your need to hire IT talent on a regular basis. Want to create a lovable work environment? Here are 10 ways you can!

1. Clear Tracks for Advancement: Nothing will stop a long tenure in its tracks quite like the lack of room for advancement. If your company has clear, attainable tracks for advancement that your top technical employees can work towards from day one at your organization, they’ll love working for you and stay for the long haul!

2. Free Food: When your employees are famished and ready to chow down, it can be distracting or time consuming to scrounge up meals and snacks all day long. That’s part of the reason why a lot of companies are choosing to offer one or more free meals a day or a week to their employees in addition to a kitchen stocked with snacks and drinks. Better yet, help your employees stay healthy and offer healthy snacks and drinks in the office so they can easily make the smarter choice.

3. Work-Life Balance: An emphasis on an improved work-life balance is essential if you want your employees to love working at your company. From flextime to partial telecommuting to increased or unlimited PTO, there are a lot of benefits your organization can offer to show their dedication to their employees’ work-life balance. Additionally, your management can input unofficial policies like a 4-day work week after a long project is completed or allowing a little extra leeway in arrival and departure times for top performers so they can schedule doctors’ appointments, attend children’s functions, or just miss out on rush hour.

4. Training and Learning Opportunities: No top technical employee will love your work environment without training and learning opportunities. After all, top technical employees are at such a high level because they love staying up to date on cutting-edge, innovative tech and, if your company offers assistance in helping them learn those latest and greatest technologies, you’ll help them reduce the amount of time and money they have to spend on the pursuit of innovative knowledge in their free time.

5. A Variety of Open and Closed Work Spaces: A lot of modern work places favor the wide-open workspaces. But, many top technical employees can get distracted in such loud, busy environments and their work suffers. However, they’ll love working in an environment with variety! Set up small, distraction free workspaces for more focused projects but also have space for them to spread out and collaboratively code when they want to!

6. Onsite Wellness: Health and wellness initiatives are all the rage with top technical employees and they should be a part of your work environment! Plus, this is a category where you can get creative! From onsite massages, onsite gyms, wellness coordinators, onsite clinics, reduced prices for gym memberships, walking meetings, and more, employees will appreciate these sometimes-small boosts towards their health and fitness journeys.

7. Room for Fun and Rooms for Fun: If your work environment is serious 24/7, a lot of top technical employees will feel stifled or get easily bored. If you want them to love your work environment, make sure there is plenty of room for fun! This could be as simple as encouraging working with a sense of humor, offering fun team outings, or as complex as building an onsite game room so employees have somewhere to go to have fun breaks together.

8. Light, Bright, and Well-Designed Spaces: Let’s face it, one of the best boosts you can give to your work environment is a good, old fashioned makeover. Top technical employees want to work in light, bright, and well-designed spaces so they’ll be happier and feel more at home in the office. These spaces are often more motivating, seen as cutting-edge, and inspiring so your employees will be more likely to produce their best work possible.

9. Open Door Policies for Ideas and Grievances: One thing any lovable work environment needs is an open door policy for ideas and grievances. If management feels closed off and unwilling to listen to their employees, top technical talent will quickly look for work elsewhere. Create that lovable work environment you aspire to by opening management’s and team leaders’ doors and ears!

10. Reduced Bureaucracy and Red Tape: Finally, the more red tape and bureaucracy at your company, the slower things will seem to move (especially for top technical talent who love to work at a lightening fast pace). Reducing the amount of bureaucracy and red tape in your work environment will instantly make it more lovable for cutting-edge techies.

Top technical employers will love working at your company when your work environment has these 10 things. And, when they love where they work, they stay for a long time, contributing added value every year and reducing the time and money you spend on hiring.