Outsourced IT Helps With IT Staff Turnover
The employee turnover rate is highest in the tech industry. In fact, a LinkedIn study found that the tech sector has a turnover rate of 13.2%. Even businesses that can effectively attract tech talent find it hard to retain them for more than a year. According to Payscale, the average tenure for tech talent – even for tech giants like Google – is as short as one year. That said, given how critical IT is to your business, you can’t afford to have an unreliable or failing IT team.
So what measures can you take to deal with IT staff turnover?
First, you need to come to terms with the fact that you can’t address some turnovers, since tech talent shortage is a challenge, and employees will always seek greener pastures. Next, you need to find solutions that prioritize your business, such that:
- Your business will have continuity regardless of who quits.
- Your business will get instant technical skills for all its IT needs.
- Ensures that your internal IT team focuses on tasks that grow your business.
Outsourcing might be the best solution for remedying IT staff turnover.
How Outsourcing Can Help You Manage IT Staff Turnover
Here is an outline of some of the ways outsourcing IT support can help you manage IT staff turnover:
1. Experience Leverage
Managed IT service providers usually handle similar problems and are therefore well-positioned to solve various IT issues based on their experience. Internal IT teams tend to experience numerous issues that are new to them and are forced to resort to research and trial and error in an attempt to solve these issues.
By outsourcing some IT tasks to a trusted provider, you’ll be certain that you’ll be working with a team that has direct experience in dealing with issues and variables that negatively affect your business in the event that a member of your internal IT staff leaves.
2. Better Workload Management
When your business experiences high staff turnover, the remaining members of your in-house IT staff will face an increased workload. The internal team will find it challenging to address day-to-day tasks such as user support, server monitoring, conducting regular backups, and monitoring network security.
The remaining IT team may find it challenging to handle daily tasks without neglecting crucial tasks such as data centre management, cloud migration, and VoIP. At the same time, if they decide to focus on high-priority tasks and neglect daily management tasks, your system will be under serviced. In a nutshell, IT staff turnover can overwhelm the remaining IT staff.
Your IT team need not choose between addressing immediate concerns and long-term initiatives. By outsourcing part of your IT tasks, you can free up time for your in-house IT team to focus on business-building projects.
3. Cost Saving on IT Solutions and Budget Certainty
Based on a recent study by Fortunly, roughly 45% of businesses that outsource their IT services save on the cost of IT solutions. Unsurprisingly, this is the main reason that fuels a business’s decision to outsource IT services in the first place.
Solving IT staff turnover by hiring new staff isn’t simple. You may have to:
- Research the right talent to replace the one(s) that left
- Offer a competitive wage for the tech role you’re looking to hire
- Offer high salaries so that no one in your tech team will want to leave
- Offer unlimited paid time off
- Incur the expense of dealing with employees’ health care and vacation time
Whereas these are all best practices for retaining your IT talent, SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses) can’t compete with salaries offered by tech giants such as Google and Amazon.
Moreover, some employees use their experience with small businesses to land better-paying jobs with bigger companies. This doesn’t serve the best interests of your business.
Partnering with an MSP (Managed Service Provider) can help you save on hiring costs by enabling you to:
- Scale up and down depending on the growth and performance of your business.
- Gain access to a vast pool of technical skills rather than recruiting several employees to deal with different IT tasks.
- Avoid the cost of hiring, onboarding, and training.
What’s more, by partnering with an MSP, you’ll get cost certainty since your provider can help develop and forecast an accurate budget for IT infrastructure that takes care of your business’s changing needs.
4. Enhanced Security and Network Reliability
Network and data security should be a priority for every business, especially given the increase in cybersecurity threats. In case your business lacks in-house cybersecurity expertise, the risk of it becoming a victim of a data breach or a ransomware attack is high. These cyber-threats can not only ruin the reputation of your business, but can also cripple your operations.
By outsourcing data security and network monitoring tasks to an MSP, you can significantly reduce operational challenges such as network downtime. Besides that, MSPs have the resources and expertise to help prevent potential data breaches.
5. Scalable Assistance and Security
As your business changes and grows, so should your IT team. For example, on-premise servers and Dropbox-type file-sharing have become impractical for addressing the needs of an expanding business. When your business starts to generate large amounts of data, you’ll need safe and readily accessible storage solutions.
While recruiting new tech staff to service your server may be a viable option, you might want a solution that executes data transfer and data backup in a way that meets data security and compliance standards to avoid security liabilities.
Partnering with a managed IT service provider will be an excellent option for transferring business data to enterprise-level cloud computing. The MSP will also provide you with complimentary services like spam filtering, authentication, encryption, firewall management, and regular data backup and recovery.
With such scalability, you’ll be better placed to deal with more tasks than your in-house staff could have handled.
6. Promotes Innovation
Working with an MSP gives you access to a wider range of technical skills that will enable your business to:
- Stay relevant in the ever-changing business environment
- Stay on top of emerging technologies
- Leverage best practices that help your business retain an agile and functional IT department even with IT staff turnover
- Address IT issues quickly because of the experience gained from handling similar issues
Through outsourced IT services, the creation, implementation, and management of cutting-edge IT technologies has become simpler and more cost-efficient than ever before.
7. Reduced Multitasking
When your business experiences an increased turnover rate, the remaining IT staff may be forced to multitask to cover the workload, lest the overwhelming workload paralyzes your business’s operations.
Whereas multitasking might come in handy on some occasions, it isn’t ideal for all situations, given that it may hamper your productivity. Employees that multitask tend to:
- Use a lot of energy switching between tasks
- Make errors while switching between tasks
- Easily lose focus due to the distraction
- Be less productive due to interrupted workflow
Outsourcing some of your IT tasks will unburden your IT staff and enable them to focus on doing the jobs for which they are most qualified.
8. Unlimited Skills and Resources
The IT skill requirement varies from business to business. With that in mind, many internal IT staff rarely possess the same level of skills as outsourced IT companies. Moreover, for the most part, when your IT expert quits, the remaining staff may be ill-equipped to handle some specific tasks.
Suppose your business needs simple IT tasks done, your in-house resources and staff may get the job done. However, if the tasks are complex, you should outsource the skills and resources of an MSP. These companies have IT experts who can bring flexibility to problem-solving using their own approaches. Internal IT teams typically rely on company protocols and policies when undertaking their tasks.
9. Develop Internal Staff
Let’s say your IT experts quit in the middle of a big project. What do you do? Do you reject the project due to a lack of expertise?
By outsourcing, where you bring in an external IT team to work together with your internal team, the internal team can pick up some skills that may come in handy in the future. Besides that, outsourcing serves as a cushion in the event that your internal IT staff quits abruptly.
OnServe Can Help Your Business Manage IT Staff Turnover
A high rate of IT staff turnover can have a negative effect on your business. According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the cost of hiring, training, and replacing employees amounts to 6-9 months of a single employee’s salary.
You need not fret if your business is in Ontario. Outsourcing your IT support to OnServe will help you:
- Fill the gaps that result from IT talent turnover.
- Retain or boost productivity by streamlining your IT tasks.
- Get IT services to help you maintain optimum operations with your network resources, regardless of who leaves your in-house IT team.
- Monitor your network 24/7/365.
- Ensure that no turnover disrupts your productivity or stalls your business.
- Get vast IT help that will ensure that your business attains its goals.
Contact us today to get started.
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