In February 2020, before the coronavirus outbreak, Core commissioned an independent survey of IT professionals to find out more about their sleep patterns and their work/life balance. We wanted to know whether working in IT affected their sleep, and if it did, which parts of the job caused them sleepless nights.
Our experience with customers had already told us that many IT teams were frazzled, spending much of their time firefighting, dealing with company IT ‘admin’ and tied up in ‘keeping the lights on’ activity instead of working on projects that grew the business.
But we also knew that many people enjoyed working in IT; they liked the sector, its many benefits and challenges, but it came at a cost. Stress levels were on the rise, and many teams seem at a loss as to what can be done to turn the heat down on the pressure cooker.
At first glance, our survey results reflected these trends, but even we were surprised by the number of people who reported losing sleep because of work and having little to no downtime due to long working hours.
Of the 257 IT professionals we asked, 38% said they have a bad night’s sleep because of work. And 29% said they found work too stressful. More than half (54%) of our surveyed pros said IT security was the aspect of work that caused them the most worry, followed closely by IT support.
And this stress and worry was spilling over into everyday life, with some of our workers saying they checked emails and took work calls outside of working hours, and often ate lunch at their desk. Somewhere along the line, working in IT had become so stressful that it was impacting their wellbeing. Not only that, the quality of work of our tired respondents was suffering; 32% said they feel less productive due to impacted sleep, and 54% of our surveyed pros said they feel tired, sleepy or groggy on a typical working day.
As we picked over the results of our survey, one thing clearly stood out. Some of our respondents reported lower stress levels, had a better work/life balance and enjoyed better sleep. So, what did these lucky people have in common? Their organisations were heavy cloud users and harnessed cloud technologies that were making life easier for their IT teams.
With a cloud IT environment, disjointed legacy systems - which are a known cause of stress for IT teams - were no more. Instead, these organisations were agile, able to keep up with their competitors and provide a better customer experience, in a cost-effective way. And compared to five years ago, job satisfaction for IT workers has risen in line with the rise of cloud technologies.
The main advantage of choosing a managed cloud solution seems to be freedom. By having a team of people overseeing day to day operations, troubleshooting and keeping their IT environment secure, these IT teams are free to concentrate on more strategic work and valuable projects which use their skills to their full potential.
For SMEs especially, moving to managed services can transform job satisfaction and productivity within their IT team. With a managed service provide taking care of day to day IT – including that biggest source of stress, security – IT teams are relieved of the burden of being the ‘emergency services’ in the business. In turn, staff retention can be improved, and new talent is easier to attract and keep.
The stats in this blog are just a snippet of our report findings. You can get the full picture and see all of the surprising stats that our survey threw up by downloading our exclusive report here.
If the 'frazzled IT team' scenario sounds familiar to you, and you know your IT team could be using their skills more productively, and getting more satisfaction from their work, talk to us about managed services and our cloud solutions.