IT teams frequently suffer from overwhelm, exhaustion, and even burnout. They often have too much work on their plate with heavy (and often unreasonable) expectations. No matter how big or talented your IT team is, they’re probably overloaded with something.
Here are some tips for supporting an exhausted IT team.
- Reduce their workload with managed services
Your IT team is likely buried in tasks that might be a priority, but it’s hard to say when they’ll get around to everything. This isn’t always a matter of disorganization. Often, it’s physically impossible for an internal team to handle everything. They’ll prioritize as best as possible, but some tasks always fall through the cracks.
The less tedium your IT team has to do, the better they’ll handle pressing matters. They’ll also be more available for your other teams when they need assistance. The optimal way to achieve this is to get managed services.
For instance, Converged Tech, a managed service provider in NYC, helps businesses increase operational efficiency by reducing their internal IT team’s workload and streamlining tedious processes.
Managed services will also strengthen your cybersecurity by providing 24/7 remote network monitoring, which is something an in-house team can’t do manually. Other benefits of managed services include:
- Access to experts in all areas of IT
- You’ll get fast access to adopt new tech
- It’s easier to scale your business
- Reduced downtime
- Stronger cybersecurity
Support your tech team with managed services and they’ll have more energy and time for priorities.
- Give your team time to fix broken processes
Broken processes are a given, and your IT team is likely used to creating workarounds. Unfortunately, working around a broken process is inefficient and wastes time. It’s also a major source of frustration and can lead to projects going over budget and past the deadline. These issues need to be addressed and fixed as soon as possible.
Although the solution is simple, your IT team may not have time to fix anything. If they’re overburdened and exhausted already, they can’t sacrifice even more time. Give your tech team the specific direction to remedy broken systems. Ask what they need to make this happen and accommodate accordingly. Your entire organization will benefit.
- Use automation
How much time does your IT team waste performing repetitive, manual tasks that can be automated? For example, do they spend time provisioning virtual environments, installing software, running scans, or updating and patching software?
Automation can handle these tasks and much more. Your tech team’s time is valuable and automation will help them maximize their efficiency and productivity.
- Create time to educate users
Sometimes, IT teams are bogged down with support requests from other company team members who just aren’t trained properly. The best way to combat this is to set aside time for training all of your teams.
The most obvious training to conduct is cybersecurity. However, teams also need to know how to do little things, like properly feed a printer or copier, connect to a wireless printer using the IP address, set up a VPN, and verify an approved device for the company network. To a tech team, all of these things seem obvious, but that’s not always the case.
Tech training should be a regular thing at your company. Every new hire needs an orientation that includes explaining the small tasks that IT staff shouldn’t have to manage, like rebooting a computer in safe mode, performing a factory reset on a device, dialing a foreign phone number from an office landline, and more. Ideally, these tasks should be included in an operational manual that staff can refer to after their training.
- Stop processing reports that don’t matter
The amount of data you can collect and process is endless, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessary. In fact, most organizations collect data that isn’t useful, and their IT teams waste valuable time processing and analyzing this information.
As a foundation, make it a point to only analyze data that you can tie to a specific goal in your organization. For example, you can generate logs of every action ever taken on your network, but not all of it will be useful. Get your IT team to focus only on processing logs of value.
Support your IT team with technology
Tech teams need plenty of support, so use software and automation whenever possible. If you don’t want to implement everything yourself, get managed services and they’ll handle it all for you. Do whatever you can to reduce your IT team’s workload and you’ll reap the benefits throughout your entire organization.
