Why software employees leave and how to understand why
Engineers and product staff leave for many reasons beyond salary. How to run an exit conversation in a software company, read the pattern and act on it.
6 min readRead articleA local telecom or broadband provider connects homes and businesses and keeps the line working. Here is how to manage field technicians, network engineers, call desks and sales agents in a service people notice only when it fails.

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Share your requirementsA telecom or broadband provider sells internet, voice or data links to homes, shops and offices. Staff include field technicians who lay cable, fix faults and install equipment, network engineers in the operations room, customer support agents, billing staff, sales agents and area managers. Outages are public, and customers expect a fast fix at any hour. Field work involves poles, ducts, rooftops and traffic, and road works cause delays. Agents face irritated callers whose connection is down, and technicians are blamed for network faults they did not cause. Local partners and contractors often add to the workforce, and their conduct reflects on the provider. See also HR for IT and software.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
GullyHR runs talent acquisition for permanent roles in telecom and broadband providers. For each role we agree the job description with you, find and screen candidates against it, and support the offer through to joining. Tell us the role and the number of people, and we start there.
We recruit permanent employees. We do not supply contract or temporary staff.
Every business interviews, but few have a written process that works the same way for every role and every interviewer. GullyHR designs yours, from the role brief to the offer, trains your managers to run it, and can run it for you on the roles you hand us.
We agree what the role must deliver, the must-have and nice-to-have skills, and how each will be scored.
Screening call, assessment, interview rounds and decision points, sized to the role and the number of people you hire.
Structured questions for each role family and a rating guide, so two interviewers judge the same answer the same way.
A short briefing for your managers on what to ask, what to avoid and how to give a clear yes or no.
Who approves, how the offer is made, and how candidates are kept informed from first call to joining.
Climbing, working at height and roadside digging bring injury and traffic danger.
Technicians and network staff are called out at night and on holidays with no fair rota.
Customers vent at the person at the door for failures that sit upstream.
Support staff absorb anger on every outage and turnover rises.
Pressure for numbers of connections leads to poor work that returns as repeat faults.
Modems, routers and cable are issued to many hands, and tracking is loose.
Partner crews with weak training damage the brand and customer homes.
Staff chasing overdue bills have a difficult role with little training in handling conflict.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Health, Safety and Wellbeing; HR Operations and Governance; Employee Relations. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for information technology and software, not in general.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
The pieces a telecom and broadband providers business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
Work-at-height rules, protective gear, road safety and incident reporting, aligned with the workplace health, safety and wellbeing process.
Work-at-height rules, protective gear, road safety and incident reporting, aligned with the workplace health, safety and wellbeing process.
Named on-call technicians and engineers, an allowance, rest after callouts and a log of hours.
Named on-call technicians and engineers, an allowance, rest after callouts and a log of hours.
Count repeat visits and customer feedback along with installations.
Count repeat visits and customer feedback along with installations.
Training in handling anger, breaks after hard calls and a way to escalate abusive callers.
Training in handling anger, breaks after hard calls and a way to escalate abusive callers.
A log of each item issued and returned to a technician, checked on exit using the exit and offboarding process.
A log of each item issued and returned to a technician, checked on exit using the exit and offboarding process.
A standard induction and conduct code for any crew working under your name.
A standard induction and conduct code for any crew working under your name.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
Work-at-height, road safety and incident handling for field crews, plus stress care for the desk.
Outage duty rotas and callout records that are fair and accurate.
Measures that include repeat visits and customer feedback, not only installations.
Return of equipment, access and company property when staff leave.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in information technology and software, and one on each of the topics this page points to.

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Provide the right gear and training, set clear working-at-height and road-safety rules and record incidents. Confirm legal requirements with a qualified professional.
Use a named rota with an allowance, time off after callouts and a record of who attended. Avoid relying on the same few willing people.
Add repeat-visit and customer-feedback measures to targets. Check some completed work and recognise quality, not just speed.
Train them, set a rule for ending abusive calls, offer breaks and have supervisors support them. Track how often it happens.
Set a conduct code and induction, require identification, collect customer feedback and act on repeated issues. Their behaviour reflects on you.
We would ask about field safety, outage duty, measures beyond installation counts and equipment tracking. A sensible first project is an outage rota with a field safety routine. Scope goes into writing before you decide.
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See all HR topics for information technology and software, or another industry.
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