Valuing IT professionals to retain talent and reduce their stress

Keeping up with digital transformation (32%) and keeping talent in technical roles (26%) are the two biggest challenges organizations face today, an Ivanti survey of IT professionals reveals.

Additionally, the study found that IT departments are viewed as critical to an organization’s growth and business strategy by 61% of respondents. However, despite this high level of support for the IT department 72% of respondents reported losing team members with 41% of respondents citing a high workload as the top reason for losing team members.

Other challenges IT professionals face

• Unrealistic expectations placed on the team (34%)
• Lack of executive support (32%)
• Remote work was not a possibility (28%)
• Executive hesitancy to adopt automation (26%)
• Lack of critical technology to effectively do their job (24%)

Interestingly there was a disconnect between C-Suite/Vice President and Managers/Directors as demonstrated by the finding that Managers and Directors were more likely to report that the IT department was viewed as only a cost center (27%) versus only 19% of C-Suite/Vice President respondents who only viewed IT as a cost center.

The pandemic accelerated the rapid shift to remote work and 67% of decision-makers reported they accelerated their plans or increased their adoption of automated IT service offerings due to the pandemic. Of note, only 1% of decision makers have already completed their adoption of automated services.

In today’s Everywhere Workplace employees expect to be able to connect with various devices to corporate networks, data and services. The need to keep these devices and services connected has placed stress on IT team members that could be alleviated by the implementation of automated IT services.

Automating IT services to alleviate stress

The study found that 55% of respondents reported automating IT processes saving the IT department 1-8 hours per service request. For organization which have over 50% of their IT services automated the time saved per service request jumped to more than 16 hours.

“Employees are working differently than they have in years before, and we’ll continue to see an evolution of how people work as we move into the future and beyond the pandemic,” said Nayaki Nayyar, President and Chief Product Officer, Ivanti.

“The workloads and pressure to perform that have been placed on IT teams will only continue to increase. The only way to alleviate some of these stresses, and retain technical talent, is to implement automation into IT services so that team members can focus their attention on activities that drive the business forward and contribute to the business strategy.”

Organizations with more than 50% of IT services automated were more likely to feel the IT department is viewed as critical to the organization’s growth and business strategy (74%) demonstrating the value of automation. Of this same group, only 32% feel the executive team views IT as only around to troubleshoot hardware or software issues vs. 47% of all respondents.

Routine manual tasks consume IT and service desk resources and limit your team members’ ability to move ahead with higher-impact strategic projects. Every minute saved is 60 seconds freed to reassign people to innovation, strategic projects, and critical business challenges.

Automation streamlines the management of complex hybrid environments by automating infrastructure, cloud, and workspace automation processes required to support the business.