IT departments everywhere are struggling with staff shortages. Thanks to a combination of layoffs, budget cuts, and competitive pressure, tech companies and other organizations have fewer internal resources to handle IT management and everyday tech issues.
What steps can the average IT department follow to manage these staffing shortages?
Tips for Managing Staff Shortages in IT
These are some of the best ways that IT departments can manage limited staff:
- Utilize staff augmentation services. IT staff augmentation services from a third party could solve your problem almost immediately. Effectively, you’ll be hiring another organization to serve as an extension of your IT department. This move is much less expensive than hiring people internally, but you’ll get access to a diverse pool of talented, experienced candidates who can help you manage your technology needs. With the right plan, you’ll close the gaps in your IT department while saving money. Just make sure you shop around and find a plan that’s flexible enough for your business.
- Offer more incentives to your existing employees. You don’t want the staff shortage to get worse, so it’s important to retain your best and most talented existing employees. There are many types of incentives that might encourage these workers to stay, such as a pay raise, better secondary benefits, or greater scheduling flexibility. If you make it more attractive to stay with your organization, you’ll lose fewer people.
- Empower non-IT employees. You can reduce the burden on your IT department by empowering employees outside the department. As a simple measure, you can give them access to a knowledge base that allows them to resolve some of their technical issues entirely on their own. You may also be in a position to train some non-technical employees on IT-related tasks to supplement your current IT forces.
- Simplify your IT architecture. Another move you can make is simplifying your IT architecture. When your IT infrastructure is streamlined, efficient, modular, and easy to understand, it requires less work to actively maintain and monitor. This can greatly reduce your labor needs, making your staffing shortages more palatable.
- Hire contractors and temporary employees. If you’re truly struggling, hiring more people might be the answer, but if you can’t afford to hire more full-time people, your best options are hiring contractors and temporary employees. These aren’t a permanent solution, but they can help you get through a difficult period.
- Provide training and education to expand capabilities. If you want to augment the capabilities of your current IT department, but you can’t hire your people, consider offering more training and education to your existing staff members. They’ll probably appreciate the opportunities to learn and grow, and you’ll get an inexpensive way to handle more responsibilities.
- Automate whatever you can. IT process automation is ideal for saving money, reducing the need for manual labor, and improving operational efficiency. While automation isn’t suitable for every task, our automated tools are growing in sophistication and availability, meaning they’re well worth considering for a wide range of applications. Consider automating everything you can within your IT department.
- Broaden your hiring search. While it may put additional burdens on your organization’s finances, the right move may be hiring more people to join your IT department. If you’re having trouble finding qualified candidates, or if you need to fill these positions as quickly as possible, it’s wise to broaden your hiring search. You can do this in a few different ways. For starters, you can make your positions open to a wider pool of potential candidates by appealing to people with less experience, or people in different areas of the country/world. You can also broaden your search by marketing and advertising your open positions on more channels.
- Offer more attractive benefits. Are you not getting enough new applicants? Or are you not getting applicants fast enough? The solution may be to offer more attractive benefits. A stronger company culture, better pay, better health insurance, and better perks can lead any business to get far more applicants for almost any position.
- Streamline hiring and onboarding. Hiring and onboarding costs can be prohibitive, and they can make it hard to fill your open positions quickly. You can address this issue by streamlining the hiring and onboarding process, making it as simple, fast, and straightforward as possible. Both your new hires and your HR team members will appreciate this move toward greater efficiency.
Planning for the Future
These IT staffing shortages may be temporary, but it’s still a good idea to plan for the future of your IT department and minimize the potential impact of staffing shortages to come. The more flexible, automated, and modular your IT department is, the better you’ll be able to withstand almost any external pressure.