How SA can win in the tech talent war

Culture can be a strategic operating system in SA’s response to the global tech talent war, writes Lizl Barnard, chief of staff and commercial operations at Skynamo.

South African businesses, and technology scale-ups in particular, face a harsh commercial reality. Local businesses simply cannot compete in the global tech talent market against multinationals on salary alone. International recruiters intentionally target South African talent not only for technical knowledge, but for our “can-do”, problem-solving ethos and adaptability under pressure.

Pay is a significant driver of the “brain drain”, alongside other reasons people cite for moving abroad. Immigration consultancy New World Immigration logged 437 IT, software, data and cybersecurity professionals who approached it about moving to Australia between late April and late June this year. Of those who gave a timeframe, around 70% wanted to leave immediately or within six months. Only 21 placed the move as far out as two years.

But it’s not just emigration that weakens the local talent pool. An IITPSA ICT Skills Survey published in 2024 found that 49% of ICT professionals are considering remote work for an overseas employer or client; 11% already do; 9% plan to, and 8% call themselves digital nomads. In the survey, a quarter of employers named skilled-labour migration as a cause of shortages.

Despite this stark reality, viewing this talent drain as an inevitable defeat misses a crucial strategic insight. Salary is not the only component of an employee’s total reward. There is an equally important intangible reward part, and this is where culture comes in.

Culture impacts the P&L

Organisations need to build sustainable defences around their talent. Start by abandoning the outdated idea that “culture” is about superficial perks; ping-pong tables, bean bags, gaming consoles and free barista coffee on tap. Culture is the foundational architecture of how a business works and how it makes decisions. For the P&L, culture done properly delivers both defensive and offensive returns:

• Defensively: This is about reducing cost. Recruitment can become a costly exercise. Recruiting strictly for a behavioural match with the company’s values reduces the cost of mishires. A well-matched hire is far less likely to result in wasting recruitment fees, onboarding hours, and open-seat friction, which happens when a poor match walks out the door.
• Offensively: A strong, adaptable culture enables teams to react and respond quickly to capitalise on immediate revenue opportunities. This is a huge advantage allowing a business to execute long before bureaucratic competitors finish restructuring their flow charts.

Making motivation measurable

While it is easy to stand on a soapbox and just proclaim culture is a strategic driver, to turn this into a reality, culture must be harnessed and not treated as a soft HR ideology or a bunch of words stuck on walls in hallways. Harnessing culture means moving beyond blunt tools like traditional eNPS, a metric adapted from customer satisfaction surveys to measure employee loyalty and workplace sentiment, and moving towards forward-leaning frameworks such as Total Motivation (ToMo).

ToMo is a concept from the Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor book “Primed to Perform”. It measures the direct motivators of play, purpose and potential against the indirect motivators of emotional pressure, economic pressure and inertia.

At Skynamo we calculate ToMo through the assessments derived from the book and results are evaluated at strategic offsites. It’s incredibly powerful. If an organisation’s motivation scores (and therefore adaptive performance) are depressed, planning major strategic shifts or ambitious market plays becomes unviable. It is like a health and fitness check before competing in a sporting event. You can have the best intentions, but your body must be primed. In the workplace, measurable motivation is the prerequisite foundation for credible business strategy.

The intangible total reward engine

For many people, how they work matters as much as what they work on, if not more so. Knowledge workers and software engineers are, at their core, creative problem solvers. Having the creative licence to solve complex problems is what makes talent want to stay. How people work is culture, and it is the intangible reward a local company can offer.

Understanding this, and acting on it, is where South African businesses can win. When local organisations cultivate a culture of play, purpose and potential, the intangible portion of total reward expands significantly. In-demand software engineers will often choose high-autonomy local scale-ups over foreign currency roles with less wiggle room if the local environments treat them like trusted professionals solving meaningful problems alongside high-calibre peers.

Culture helps the long game

Corporate strategy operates across “now, next, and later” horizons. A high-retention culture ensures that the same people who helped shape the “later” horizon are around to execute on it when it arrives. The value of this cannot be overstated. When the people in an organisation are elevated as core stakeholders, alongside shareholders and customers, accountability becomes a natural consequence of the resulting high engagement. In our experience, this continuity is critical and culture played a central role in achieving it.

South African tech firms will not win the global talent war on salary. They can win it on culture: on the quality of the work, and on how people are treated while they do it.

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