4 Red Flags Your IT Staff is Overworked—and How to Fix It
With modern companies depending on their tech for just about every day-to-day task, it’s likely your IT staff is constantly busy—but are they too busy?
On top of having a negative impact on the health of your IT staff themselves, an unachievably high workload could be having a serious impact on the health of your business overall.
Here are four red flags that your IT staff is overworked and what you can do to fix the problem.
1. You haven’t upgraded your cybersecurity.
Your cybersecurity needs to be as strong as it can be to protect you from the latest threats. If you haven’t seen any upgrades to your cybersecurity for a while, it could be because your IT staff is too focused on putting out daily IT fires that they have no time to make such upgrades. In serious cases, you could find that basic security monitoring is not even taking place because IT staff are so busy.
Cyberattacks come in all forms, from phishing to SQL injections to ransomware. These methods of attack are constantly evolving, and you need to be certain that your IT staff is on top of this.
A successful attack could lead to heavy financial losses and, more than likely, loss of trust from customers and employees. Lawsuits may even be filed against you leading to further financial losses.
Talk to your IT staff to see what upgrades they have been making and decide whether extra hands are needed to make sure that your cybersecurity is up to date.
2. Tech disruptions are hindering your day-to-day operations.
Your IT staff is employed to help put out fires and ensure business continuity, but what if they’re unable to keep up with all the fires? If IT problems are causing downtime and you’re unable to get them fixed quickly because your staff are currently working on another issue, it could be a clear sign that your staff is in need of some assistance.
While you can hire extra IT staff to take some of the strain, a more economical and efficient option could be to outsource your IT needs to a Managed Service Provider. This involves hiring the help of a third-party company that specializes in IT and can supplement or offer co-managed IT services to your team.
Such companies can provide around-the-clock assistance and may be able to react more immediately to threats than in-house IT employees who are juggling other duties.
3. Your infrastructure doesn’t support business growth.
Business growth is a sign that things are going well. However, you could start to experience problems if your infrastructure isn’t scalable.
Perhaps there are tasks that could be automated to deal more efficiently with the increased number of customers, or maybe you feel that everything could be centralized more efficiently. If multiple employees are having to take turns to use software because you’ve only paid for a certain amount of users at a time, this could also inhibit growth.
Your IT staff should be ahead of the game, setting up your infrastructure to scale before your business has a chance to outgrow it. If this isn’t the case, it could be because your IT staff are too busy solving day-to-day problems to focus on scaling up your tech. Address this problem with your IT staff and decide whether a helping hand is needed.
4. You don’t have any IT strategy implemented.
Your IT staff should be thinking long-term and not just focusing on dealing with daily issues as they come. If they’re constantly dealing with emergencies, they’re unlikely to have time to work on an IT strategy that will propel your business forward.
An IT strategy could include planning out improvements that need to be made to infrastructure and cybersecurity, as well as planning hardware upgrades and maintenance strategies.
While you may be planning improvements in other areas of your business, your company will ultimately be held back if your IT isn’t optimized. Make sure to talk to your IT staff about future plans for your business to ensure that there is a strategy in place. Hiring supplemental IT services could be necessary to help reduce day-to-day emergency tasks so that there is time to focus on a strategy.
