How to Create an Overworked, Underpaid—But Fully Engaged—IT Workforce (Pt 2: How to Make “Boring But Necessary Work” Engaging)
Last week, we confronted an uncomfortable professional reality: As an IT leader, at least once in your career you will face lean times— stretches when IT’s resources are substantially reduced and everyone feels the pinch. During these times, three major problems crop up:
- A reactive desire to just accept the lean times and mechanically grind forward creeps into your team.
- The exciting projects your team members love will get cut from the operating plan, and be replaced with boring but necessary work.
- Big bonuses and raise opportunities are eliminated from your budget, removing the traditional incentives you can give to your people to make them feel valued.
Faced with these challenges, you have a choice—you can try to just survive the lean times, or you can do what it takes to thrive within the sub-optimal IT environment.
As an ambitious IT leader, your choice is clear. You’ll do whatever it takes to thrive—even when times get tough.
The first step towards thriving during hard times is simple, but challenging: remember that lean times don’t have to be hard times. Instead of just grinding your people forward, proactively embrace the restraints these stretches offer, and look for unique opportunities to strengthen your fundamental leadership skills. (Read more about how to do this here.)
Next, address the second big challenge lean times bring—find a way to keep your people happy with their work without relying on exciting projects.
IT Budget Cutbacks = Few Exciting IT Projects
When IT budgets get slashed, the first projects that get cut are all those big, sexy, forward-thinking implementations you and your people felt so excited to take on.
And what’s left over?
In most cases— tasks that keep day-to-day operations humming, and relatively mundane infrastructure-related projects that offer incremental improvement to existing systems.
Not exactly the stuff IT dreams are made of. No wonder your team members can easily become demotivated and unproductive during lean times. They joined IT to keep up with cutting-edge technology, and now because IT budgets are lowered they find their plate filled with “boring but necessary” assignments that wouldn’t excite even the most junior members of your staff.
Thankfully, your people don’t need to feel excited about the assignments they’re given to feel good about their work. They only need to feel their assignments are worth doing. And unlike excitement, that level of engagement can be engineered—for any piece of work, in any IT environment—by giving each assignment two key qualities:
Each Assignment Needs to be Interesting
As knowledge-workers, your people need to find their work intellectually stimulating on some level to continue to engage their assignments with their creativity, curiosity and desire to share ideas. If your people aren’t engaged with their work on this level of intellectual interest, they will feel like they are just moving widgets from warehouse A to warehouse B.
Each Assignment Needs to feel Important
IT pros are often disconnected from the direct impact that results from their efforts. They pour hours of effort into a terminal in the basement of the main offices, but the result of that effort shows up a month later during a sales call halfway across the country. To make your people feel the work they do matters in real ways, you need to connect the dots between their effort and the tangible business outcomes that result.
Learn how to make any assignment interesting and important, and your people engage with all the “boring but necessary” work that dominates their work queue during lean times.
A quick note: the truly ambitious IT leader doesn’t set this skill aside when budgets are full and exciting projects are on the table, for two simple reasons:
- Even exciting projects are filled with “boring but necessary” work that your people need to find interesting and important enough to engage with.
- Certain roles in IT only handle “boring but necessary” assignments, and the ability to make those roles engaging is a hallmark of effective IT leadership.
Follow a few simple steps every time you hand out an assignment, and you will join the most ambitious IT leaders who make sure their people find their work engaging no matter what’s going in the larger business environment.
