Culture and job satisfaction at MSPs: why former staff should leave as fans

Culture and job satisfaction at MSPs only becomes visible on the day someone resigns. Not in the exit interview itself, but in what that person says about you at a drinks event six months later, to someone who turns out to be a prospect. That is where your employer brand is built, not in the job advert.

Most MSP owners I speak to think they are working on culture. There is a table tennis table, there is a Christmas party, and the senior engineers go along to a vendor event in Barcelona once a year. On paper that is job satisfaction. In practice you see in those same outfits an old guard that has been in the same chair for seven years, and a younger guard that is gone again after 14 months to a competitor offering 300 euros more.

The frustrating part is that those two groups want completely different things, and that most owners treat it as one problem. The old guard is attached to colleagues, to the friendship on the floor, to the feeling that things stay as they are. Pull them apart and you lose them. The younger guard wants to experience things, move up, earn more. For them it matters less which colleagues they do it with. If you apply the same retention policy to both groups, you lose one of the two whatever you do. Usually both.

What really drives job satisfaction at MSPs in practice

What does work is a simpler framework than most HR consultants sell you. People look for three things in an employer: learning, earning and yearning. The chance to develop, the chance to earn, and the chance to belong somewhere. They need all three. The weighting differs by life stage and by how long someone has been somewhere.

For the old guard in your MSP the weight sits on yearning. They stay mainly because the outfit feels the way it feels. For young talent, earning and learning count for more, because they are still building towards what they want to become. So as an owner you do not have to design one culture. You have to know which of the three leads for whom, and steer on that person by person. That is less glamorous than a culture manifesto on the wall, but it is what makes the difference between a team that stays and a team that churns.

Setting the example: what gets said when the boss is not in the room

I know an MSP owner who put it literally: the René of 25 was far quicker with a retort than the René of today. These days he thinks longer before saying something, because he knows that what he says as the owner does not carry the same weight as what a colleague says. What the boss throws on the table lands differently from what an engineer shouts on a Friday afternoon. And what gets shouted when he is not in the room is a third category again. That third category is the real culture. Not what is on your website, not what you say yourself in the onboarding conversation, but what a service desk employee says to the person next to them at quarter to five on a Thursday about the client who just called. That is where your culture sits. And that is also your biggest blind spot as an owner, because you are by definition the last to hear it.

Most MSPs have a male culture. Four out of five colleagues are blokes, and what gets shouted gets shouted. As long as everyone understands those remarks and nobody is in the room for whom it is not fine, it goes well for a long time. Until you hire a female engineer, or a junior who is not comfortable with it. And then it turns out culture is not something you can put in a box at HR. Psychological safety is not the responsibility of one job title, it is the responsibility of everyone drawing a salary from the same company.

Attracting female talent versus keeping it

There is female talent in the MSP sector. The problem is not that it does not exist, the problem is that we do not find it and, when we do, we let it flow out again within two years. Everyone shouts diversity, but inclusion hardly at all. Bringing people in is one thing, keeping them on board is a completely different craft. That starts with how you write a vacancy, what bias sits in your interview, and whether there is a role at all that someone can aspire to if they want to grow. In an outfit of 18 people with four senior roles that are all taken, the growth route simply stops after eighteen months. You can stretch that for a while with sideways moves and internal projects, but at some point you have to be honest.

And being honest also means: sometimes the best move for someone you would like to keep is to help them take the next step outside your company. Counterintuitive, but it is the only way to build a reputation over the long term that people sign themselves up for. I know MSPs where former staff come back after three years as a client, as a supplier, or simply as someone who puts forward three candidates via LinkedIn. That does not happen because you chained them down, it happens because with you they felt they were allowed to grow, even if that eventually meant leaving.

Let people leave as fans, including the people you had trouble with

And then comes the moment when someone leaves anyway. Here most MSP owners make their biggest mistake. They have had trouble with someone, or they are secretly relieved, and they arrange the exit interview in 20 minutes with a bunch of flowers from the petrol station. Why? When someone leaves your company, that person should walk out as a fan. Even the people you think: good that you are going. Because it gets around. In a sector where everyone knows each other through vendor events, LinkedIn and old colleagues, your reputation as an employer is built by people who no longer work for you. And the finest proof: people who leave well regularly come back after a few years because the grass was not greener next door after all. People who leave badly never come back and spend ten years telling anyone who will listen what a rotten boss you were.

Practically: take the exit interview yourself, do not leave it to HR. Ask further about what could have been better, not defensively but genuinely interested. Arrange the last month decently, do not make handing in the laptop feel like a police raid, and send a message six months later to ask how things are going. That costs you an hour per leaver and earns you something no employer branding campaign can buy: people who speak well of you unprompted.

Over the next twenty years the labour market will only get tighter as the population ages. AI helps you manage away a lot of hassle, but the human part of running an MSP does not get easier, only more important. Anyone building an outfit now that people enjoy joining and enjoy talking about after they have left will be in a fundamentally different position in the labour market in five years from the MSP that still thinks culture is a table tennis table.