MSPNetworks Blog

Your business works with a lot of vendors. Each of these vendors requires your time, energy, and resources. Do you have the assets to handle all of them yourself, or would it all be better spent elsewhere on more profitable tasks and projects? Today, we’ll highlight your business’ vendor management options.

Today, IT is important for many things. It's not just a small part of a company… but how deeply is IT woven into modern workplace culture? Let's delve into how technology and culture coalesce in today's businesses.

Mindset is important regardless of what someone is doing, but it plays an especially important part in the workplace. This only becomes more true when that workplace is distributed, and work is actually done in the worker’s home.

Let’s go into the kind of perspective you want to encourage in your team as they utilize remote work.

Among IT professionals, an acronym is sometimes used when discussing certain issues and challenges: “PEBKAC,” or Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair. In other words, user error. 

Believe it or not, if you were to rank your business’ greatest threats, risk factors, and vulnerabilities, your users would most likely belong somewhere toward the top. Human error is a big challenge to your security simply because cybercriminals understand that your employees are, in fact, human and will, in fact, make mistakes.

Let’s explore how cyberattacks exploit this tendency and how you can better protect your business from the ramifications.

The workplace has undergone a dramatic shift over the past several years in favor of remote work, due in no small part to worldwide circumstances. In fact, many workers who would prefer to work in-office found themselves unable to, pushing the button on the topic of remote work even more. While there are some outspoken companies that want to see the return of in-office work, experts in the industry seem to be of the opposite opinion.

The numbers suggest that a hybrid workplace environment is the growing norm, and companies are adopting policies and procedures to put these accommodations in place.

Really, Not That Many Companies Are Pushing for In-Office Work

The news might report that various companies like Goldman Sachs or Tesla have labeled these efforts as a way to force out “uncommitted” employees; after all, if they can’t come work in-house, they shouldn’t be working here at all, right?

This isn’t really the case; it’s quite rare to see this happen.

In fact, the exact opposite is happening. More companies than ever are willing to accept a hybrid workspace. According to data cited by Prithwiraj Choudhury, one of the associate professors at Harvard Business School, approximately 30% of United States workdays are completed remotely and office occupancy has hovered at around 50%. The numbers don’t exactly represent mandating a return to in-office work.

Hybrid Efforts Can Be Designed for Specific Organizational Needs

You don’t have to stretch too far to see the benefits of a hybrid approach for business, particularly for its employees. The flexibility is helpful and can be a great boon for recruitment purposes. Granted, this is assuming that you can find a way to make hybrid work for your workflows. Your departments might need different things, and you might have to work with your staff to create in-house schedules for various purposes.

Ultimately, however, the flexibility offered to employees through hybrid work arrangements is such a value to them that they could truly thrive in these types of environments when given the chance to do so. Flexibility is sure to be one of the biggest requirements on the radars of highly qualified candidates in the near future.

Work with Us to Improve Your Hybrid Workplace Technology

If your business is ready to consider hybrid technology a priority, we’re ready to help! To learn more, call us today at (516) 403-9001.

Digital monitoring is a bit of a contentious topic in business, but according to a survey from Gartner, it might not be as contentious of a topic as previously thought. In fact, employees are often in favor of digital monitoring under the appropriate circumstances, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of their jobs.

This survey from Gartner found that 96% of workers would accept electronic monitoring of their work activity in exchange for other opportunities, like training and career development. Furthermore, 33% of workers would accept monitoring if it helped them perform their jobs more effectively, and 30% would do so if it meant more proactive IT support. These numbers are telling in a lot of ways.

The survey examined 4,861 full-time knowledge workers using digital technology from September 2022 to November 2022. The workers surveyed were employed by companies with more than 100 employees, and these companies were based in the United States, United Kingdom, India, and China. Whether or not employees supported monitoring largely depended on the type of monitoring being done. Those who supported the monitoring were only in favor if it wasn’t being done for the sake of catching employees who weren’t working to the best of their ability or catching them not coming to the office. The stipulation of monitoring is that it needs to be done with the sake of helping employees work toward goals and outcomes.

In particular, the study highlights just why monitoring can be effective for IT teams. Lane Severson, a Gartner senior director analyst researching digital employee experiences, argues in the report that IT administrators can more effectively identify points of “digital friction” through the use of digital monitoring, something which enables teams to better optimize for productivity and ensure operations are going smoothly. Here are the three types of digital friction that monitoring can help fight against:

• Application friction: A business’ applications are not working properly, leading to your employees not being able to perform their duties.
• Skills friction: The applications are working properly, but the employee does not have the skills or knowledge to make proper use of them.
• Process friction: A business’ applications are working properly and the employees know how to use them, but the processes associated with that application conflict with getting the work done.

If you want your business to thrive, MSPNetworks can help to ensure that your technology is supporting your employees in a way which enables success. To learn more about what we can do for your business, reach out to MSPNetworks at (516) 403-9001.

Password changes, multi-factor authentication, and countless changes in policy and procedure can make daily workflows more and more complicated. Cybersecurity can truly be a pain—a necessary pain, granted—but a pain nevertheless, and one that can gradually lead to burnout if you aren’t careful. Let’s go over how to mitigate the likelihood of it.

Understanding Security Fatigue

Let’s put yourself in the shoes of one of your employees for a moment—although, if we’re really being honest, the following scenario could easily apply to anyone in your organization, including you.

How often have you sighed when asked to create yet another new password, or groaned when a multifactor authentication prompt +pops up, when all you’re trying to do is your job? Does news of the next security training make you roll your eyes?

You aren’t alone. Not by a long shot.

The truth is, modern cybersecurity—for all its importance—is a balancing act. While the human element is consistently one of the weakest elements of the average business’ security, the numerous policies, procedures, and protections intended to help mitigate the vulnerabilities your team members contribute to can backfire.

For instance, how would you feel if it consistently became more and more challenging for you to complete the same tasks you had always been responsible and accountable for, without the tasks themselves changing at all? Pretty frustrated, I’d assume, and motivated to do whatever you could to streamline these challenges…going so far as to cut corners or overlook whatever requirements you could get away with neglecting.

This is the phenomenon known as security fatigue—where there is so much emphasis put on security and the safeguards intended to ensure it, that your team becomes disinterested and behaves less securely as a result.

Some Signs that Security Fatigue Has Set In

You’ll want to be on your guard so you can spot some of the warning signs in both your own behaviors and those of your team members. For instance:

• Have you or your team members grown more lax with your password practices?
• Are you or your team members prone to connect to insecure networks without the added protection of a virtual private network, even when accessing sensitive accounts and data?
• Do you and your team keep an eye out for signs of phishing, or are most messages taken at face value?
• Are work devices commonly used for personal activity?
• Is IT kept apprised of incidents and issues promptly, or are such things only reported when the circumstances are severe?
• Do you or your team members frequently use workarounds to bypass your security?
• Are work devices kept appropriately up-to-date, or have updates been somewhat neglected?

If any of these sound familiar, you may have a bit of onset security fatigue.

How to Correct Security Fatigue

Fortunately, there are a few ways that you can counteract this phenomenon in your business. While we in no way are attempting to minimize the importance of security of all kinds for modern businesses, it is important to also keep in mind that too much apparent security can easily hurt your team’s productivity. Therefore, by helping to take as much off your team members’ plates as possible, through things like automatic patches, remote management, and password management systems, you can better strike a balance between productivity and security without short-changing either.

MSPNetworks is here to help you do just that. Let us shoulder your cybersecurity needs so your team can focus more on your productivity, without worrying that you’re left vulnerable as a result. Give us a call at (516) 403-9001 to learn more about what we’ll do, and how you could benefit.

Whether or not you believe acronyms are an acceptable form of speech, some people might use them habitually or instinctively even for business communications. Of course, they don’t have much place in this context, but habits are hard to break. To address this issue, one innovative thinker has created a tool that can help determine if the acronym “LOL” is sincere or not.

Curious? Read on to learn more about this tool and why we think it’s pretty neat.

This Device Puts a Stop to Phony LOLs

The phrase “laughing out loud” often means nothing, something which inspired Brian Moore to build a device that can detect when the LOL is not what it appears to be. It’s supposed to mean that something is eliciting an outburst of laughter, but oftentimes, it’s used to either lighten conversations or to fill space in a conversation. This device can actually detect if someone LOLed before sending the message: the LOL Verifier.

We’ll let him explain it for himself:

I made this thing called LOL Verifier: a device that only lets you type lol if you’ve actually laughed out loud pic.twitter.com/Gsc63yGEm0

— Brian Moore (@lanewinfield) January 3, 2023

Basically, Moore built the device to filter out LOLs that the user did not laugh out loud at before typing, replacing it instead with a different form of appreciative approval. He plans to release the code to the public, despite it requiring at least 20 minutes of training before it can actually detect anything with accuracy. In other words, you have to laugh in front of your computer for 20 minutes so it can figure out your speech patterns.

Why Is This a Good Idea?

Basically, it keeps people honest, but in a different sense, it exposes the gap between what we feel and what we write. It’s remarkably easy to send an LOL with little-to-no thought, thus killing any sincerity in the conversation. This isn’t something that really applies to the business world, but it does showcase how the right technology can be used to find solutions to specific problems.

For example, imagine a solution that can keep problematic emails out of your employees’ inboxes, freeing them from the possibility of wasting time on potentially dangerous messages. This is exactly what spam filtering does, and antivirus works the same way by keeping threats out of your network, thus keeping it safe. Content filtering, as well, can be a preventative tool to keep your employees from visiting time-wasting or risky websites.

If any of the above sound like helpful solutions for your business, call MSPNetworks today at (516) 403-9001.

Technology is only effective in the hands of the right—or, at least, well-trained—employees. To work toward this goal, you’ll have to ramp up your hiring processes to ensure you garner the interest of the right candidates for the jobs. Nowhere is this more true than for your IT department. Let’s go over how you can make your business an attractive employment option for skilled and innovative technicians.

Better Technology Means a More Attractive Workplace

No one wants to work for a business that refuses to upgrade its technology and makes do with substandard solutions—especially in today’s flexibility-minded era. If you want to attract and retain top talent, you’ll need to offer them options like the opportunity for remote work when necessary, or at least part of the time. Your IT department is going to want these capabilities anyway, after all, because they only serve to improve your business’ operations.

Technology Makes Recruitment Easier

Keep in mind that you’re not the only one out there looking for top talent. If you take too much time during the hiring and interviewing process, you might find yourself being ghosted by candidates who were contacted by other, faster organizations. Automation is one tool you can use to ensure that your candidate searches go as efficiently as possible. The right solution will make scheduling interviews and reviewing resumes much easier. This should not only help you attract the attention of top talent, but do so before the competition does, too.

Technology is Great for Professional Development and Education

The last piece of advice we want to leave you with is that you should always encourage your team to expand their current skill sets. Again, with IT requiring constant learning, and sometimes relearning, of various practices and principles, you’ll want to ensure that your team has time to pursue tasks and skills that enrich your business. Automation can free up more time for training by virtue of making tasks easier and less time-consuming. Plus, it also allows your team to be happier with the tasks they are charged with because they will be more impactful and meaningful than rote work. 

If you’re worried about attracting top IT talent, look no further than MSPNetworks. We can be your in-house IT department just as easily as an outsourced agency. To learn more, call us at (516) 403-9001.

Hot desking—the workplace organization method wherein there are no assigned workstations—has an assortment of pros and cons to it, but many companies are finding the more fiscal benefits to be worth the trade-offs. Let’s explore some of the pros and cons of hot desking, and go over a few tips and strategies that will help if you choose to implement it. 

First, let’s try to get a better handle on what hot desking really is.

Hot Desking is, in a Nutshell, Allowing Employees to Choose Where They Work Each Day

Instead of assigning each of your employees a dedicated workspace to use, a hot desking strategy consists of unassigned desks or shared work areas where team members come in and use what is available each day, or the work area they have reserved (more on this later). While hot desking isn’t practical for all departments in your organization—it isn’t as though reception can hide in a back office, for instance, and human resources will have needs that necessitate a devoted workspace—it can work quite well for many, if not most, of your team members.

This flexible workplace strategy brings about some real benefits…but it is important to also recognize some of its inherent drawbacks as well.

Pros of Hot Desking

There are a few advantages of hot desking that should not be overlooked:

• Cost Savings - With remote and hybrid work policies more common than they’ve been ever before, hot desking is one way to facilitate efforts to downsize your office space. Downsizing in this way leads to reduced costs in a variety of contexts, like utilities and insurance.
• Employee Satisfaction and Anti-Siloing - Speaking of remote work, hot desking in-office time helps by allowing your workers to diversify the colleagues they work amongst. Rather than a member of your sales team exclusively spending time with other sales team members, they can mingle with members of other departments and learn more as a result.
• Opportunity for Improved Collaboration - On a related note, this co-mingling between teams and departments helps to naturally encourage collaboration amongst your staff as a whole, helping boost productivity and outcomes alike.

Cons of Hot Desking

It would be insincere of us to neglect to mention some of the drawbacks of hot desking along with the benefits it presents, so:

• Challenges Finding People - Due to the flexible nature of hot desking as a strategy, it can become more of a hassle to track people down in the office. This makes those ad-hoc meetings harder to hold, ultimately slowing processes.
• Feelings of No Support - Interspersing members of different departments, with different responsibilities and work styles, can leave people feeling out of place and on their own. Plus, hot desking mostly eliminates the opportunity to personalize the workspace, leaving many less comfortable as a result.
• Unpleasant Competition - Without a fair and equitable system for your employees to use to claim a space to work, prime office real estate will likely become a point of contention for your team members. Furthermore, the different work styles we alluded to above can also create distractions between coworkers depending on the tasks they are assigned.

How to Manage a Hot Desking Workspace

If you’re interested in trying out hot desking in your office, we advise you to prioritize a few things (trust us, you’ll thank us later):

Document Your Hot Desking Policies

Obviously, this really applies to any business policy, but it is crucial that you comprehensively lay out the expectations and standards you have of employees who will be participating in a hot desking implementation. What responsibilities will these employees have? What processes will they need to follow? Setting a precedent in writing will help to reduce some of the drawbacks outlined above.

Set Up a Reservation System, and Zone Your Office for Different Needs

If hot desking leads to fewer places in the office itself to work, it becomes critical that your employees have a way to claim a workspace—otherwise, you could easily have days where there aren’t enough workplaces for your team to use. Requiring an employee to reserve a desk or work area ahead of time helps mitigate this issue.

You may also consider establishing different work zones for different tasks in the office. Whether someone’s work responsibilities might distract others or a group needs a shared space to collaborate, determining different areas to be used for different tasks can help cut down on friction.

Give Your Team Members a Space for Personalization

We discussed that a workplace devoid of any personal expression can lead to stress, and that hot desking makes this kind of expression more difficult. If you can, give your team members some secure storage space to keep personal items that can be displayed and put away each day. In addition to this, don’t hesitate to incorporate various customizable elements into each workstation—things like standing desks, adjustable monitors and chairs, and the like—so that each person is as comfortable as possible wherever they happen to be working.

Keep Things Clean

You’ll also want to enforce a clean desk policy while hot desking, just in case some employees neglect to take care of the space they’re using—after all, they might not be using it tomorrow. Provide cleaning materials, such as antibacterial wipes and hand sanitizers, and establish that your team is expected to use them.

It is also important that your team observe good data hygiene practices as well. Whether in physical or digital format, all work materials need to be properly stored at the end of the day. We recommend that the cloud is used to facilitate this, as no files are stored on the hardware used to access this data.

Use Technology to Your Advantage

Today, modern IT solutions exist that make hot desking relatively seamless, so long as they are implemented properly. Making sure that all of your technology, from your networking equipment to the workstation hardware to the software your team relies on, is in proper working order is absolutely critical.

Interested in Implementing Hot Desking? We Can Help!

Managed IT services, like the ones we provide, are ideal for modern office needs. Regardless of whether your team members are working remotely, in-house, or a mix of the two, we can help deliver the IT support and services your business needs.

With our monitoring and management capabilities, we’ll make sure that the technology aspect of your business is covered. Give us a call at (516) 403-9001 to learn more about us and our services.

With technology playing such a massive role in modern business processes, having someone in the higher ranks to oversee it is a huge advantage. This is the role of the Chief Information Officer—the CIO—which makes them an integral part of the modern C-suite.

So, what kind of thing does the CIO (or your business’ equivalent of it) need to know and consider in order to fulfill their role? 

Let’s go over a few of the priorities the CIO will need to have in the coming year and years, and what skills they’ll need to have.

What Does Your IT Leadership Need to Focus On?

There are a few key areas that the person taking the lead on your business’ IT should devote their attention to in the coming year.

• Budget Defensibility - With the signals we’ve been seeing as far as the economy is concerned, budgets are bound to be pretty tight for businesses. This puts the often resource-intensive IT department in the crosshairs for cuts...even though these cuts could negatively impact the business as a whole.
  
  As such, it will be important that a company’s IT leadership has a good handle on how much return the department is seeing on the company’s investment into it, and that they have empirical data to support these conclusions. Focusing on value will help you to communicate this more effectively.
  
  
• Data Security and Protection - The unpleasant reality is that cyberattacks aren’t going to go away. Why would they? Economic and geopolitical struggles often go hand in hand with cyberthreats—many of which can and will target businesses of any size—which only adds to the current need for improved cybersecurity across the board.
  
  
• Adaptability - The world learned the hard way how effective remote (or “distributed”) work can be just a few years ago, despite many resisting it for as long as they could. Despite distributed work quite literally keeping many companies from going under, a considerable number of these companies have been quick to pull their employees back into the office. For many of these employees, it has been an unhappy return.
  
  Today’s CIOs need to understand and embrace remote work as the net benefit that it is, creating a strategy that allows the business to take full advantage of its employees’ skills, wherever they happen to be working.

We Can Help Your Business, Supporting Your CIO (or Even Stepping Into the Role)

As a managed service provider, we have the capability to work alongside your Chief Information Officer to ensure that their plan for your business’ IT is properly implemented in a way that is both effective and fiscally responsible for your business’ situation. Don’t have a CIO? No problem—we can also serve as a virtual CIO for you, taking the lead on your business technology strategy.

Learn more about the options you have with MSPNetworks by giving us a call at (516) 403-9001!

It doesn’t matter if your workplace is your typical office space or if it is remote. There will always be factors that can contribute to burnout. These struggles are not exclusive to the location of the office, and if left unchecked they can impact work performance, productivity, mental health, and so on. It’s important that you have coping mechanisms and strategies in place to address burnout before it becomes too severe to counter.

Let’s go over some of the ways you can encourage employees to prioritize their own mental health to reduce burnout from the workplace.

Minimizing Burnout

Here are some strategies you can use to keep burnout at bay.

Stop, Take a Breath, and Focus

If enough pressure builds up, you’re going to break, no matter how strong-willed you are. You need a break every once in a while. It’s important that you make your breaks as impactful as possible by taking a moment to clear your mind of all the clutter and take slow, deep breaths. Once you’re ready, you can get back to work.

Encourage Communications Across Departments

People rely on others to help them get their jobs done, so you should be prepared to ask for help from other departments or other people at your company to handle tasks as needed. You shouldn’t isolate yourself and your tasks from others who might help you get things done in a more efficient or stress-free way.

Be sure to establish clear lines of communication with other departments so when the time comes for collaboration, you’ll know exactly who to talk to and when. Collaboration lightens the workload for all, and it can reduce burnout in spades.

Consider Low-Pressure Hobbies

Some people bring their work home with them, so to speak, when they use their personal time and space to work or worry about work. This kind of stress can wear people down over time and create burnout.

We recommend that all employees have hobbies and interests outside of the workplace so they can get their mind off things when they need to. This will help to mitigate burnout and help them do things they enjoy.

Implement Procedures to Help with Stress

One of the best things you can do for your workplace is to implement procedures that take the stress out of work. You can streamline processes by automating them and reducing the margin for error, allowing employees to invest that time in better, less stressful and more meaningful work, thereby reducing stress further.

Combat Burnout Before You Get Burned

If you keep your team engaged in their work, burnout will eventually become a factor, so take steps now to keep it in check. MSPNetworks can help you in this effort by making sure that technology struggles don’t exacerbate the problem. To learn more, call us at (516) 403-9001.

Chances are pretty good that, by this point, you’ve heard of burnout—maybe you’ve even suffered from it before yourself—but, just in case you’re a remarkably lucky human being, it’s the phenomenon where your employees become disengaged to the point where their performance suffers. While this isn’t good in any facet of your business, it can be especially damaging in terms of your security.

Let’s explore the concept of cybersecurity burnout (spoiler alert: it’s present at all levels, all the way up to cybersecurity pros) and how it could potentially cause problems for your business.

What is Cybersecurity Burnout?

The concept of burnout is a simple one: as we’ve said, it’s a deep-seated disengagement that one of your employees feels from the job you employed them to do. Cybersecurity burnout, generally speaking, is burnout that impacts a business’ cybersecurity professionals and leads them to feel this level of disengagement. However, the reality of today’s workplace is that everyone has to be responsible for cybersecurity.

As a result, everyone is also susceptible to cybersecurity burnout.

 In terms of cybersecurity burnout, the aforementioned disengagement presents itself in a few different ways:

• Human error, in terms of missed phishing signs due to increased stress (which enables attackers to hide their attacks that much more effectively)
• Increased apathy, leading to less adherence to best practices like password standards or bans on shadow IT
• Diminished productivity, leading to less accomplished for your business overall
• Turnover, as stressed and frustrated employees seek out better work environments and compensation

None of this bodes well for a business, so what can be done to prevent this kind of burnout?

How Can I Keep My Employees Engaged in Cybersecurity?

When it comes to cybersecurity burnout, resolving it is very similar to how you would resolve any kind of burnout:

• Recover - Burnout is largely the result of an employee being worn down and exhausted, emotionally and mentally. Giving them the chance to recharge their batteries throughout the day—and insisting they utilize it—can help them break the patterns that lead to swifter burnout.
• Reorient - Once your team members have recovered somewhat, it’s time to help them get back on task in a more effective and balanced manner. Helping them identify their priorities and grasp the importance of their security-related tasks is an effective way to do so.
• Renew - Finally, it is time to help prevent this kind of cybersecurity burnout from coming back. Encourage your team members to develop their professional relationships with one another, and work with them to help align the values that they have with those of your company.

Turn to Us for Assistance with Your Cybersecurity

We’re here to help you keep your business secured in any way we can, especially through our monitoring and maintenance services. This can help take some of the pressure off your employees, allowing them to focus on their tasks more effectively.

Find out more by giving us a call at (516) 403-9001.

The average person will spend an estimated one-third of their life at work. One third. That’s a lot of time, providing plenty of opportunity to accumulate stress. Over time, these emotions could potentially overwhelm your employees and lead to a breakdown. This is, naturally, harmful to your business, so let’s explore some strategies you can share with your team to help them deal with their workday stresses.

Separate Yourself from Your Stress

The feeling of rising stress is unmistakable, particularly when you’ve experienced it before. Sometimes, escaping this stress is a matter of actually moving yourself away from it. Take a break, walk away, and do some deep breathing. Removing yourself from the situation can make all the difference, allowing you to rally and recover.

On the emotional side of things, practice looking at things from an outside perspective. While the situation will still be stressful, doing your best to take yourself out of it and considering it as though it is happening to someone else can help to take off the pressure until you can collect yourself. It can also give you the insight needed to see the stress-inducing issues from a new perspective, allowing you to solve them more effectively. 

Identify What Triggers Your Stress

If you want to avoid emotional breakdowns at work, it’s important that you are able to figure out what sets you off so that you can adjust to avoid or minimize them. For instance, maybe you have a rough time handling criticism, or you get a little bit of stage fright while making a presentation. Once you’ve identified these triggers, you can start to create techniques to help you manage your response…maybe a quick conversation with a trusted coworker before you have to speak, or (as we alluded to above) taking a walk to process the criticism you’ve received. 

Work Through Emotions

Speaking of processing criticism, it’s important that any and all negative feelings are appropriately dealt with so that they don’t interfere with workplace processes or relationships. Simply trying to push these feelings down and lock them away is exhausting and, frankly, unsustainable. This is why it is so important to take the time to process these emotions before they lead to the dreaded meltdown.

Have a Recovery Strategy

However, in the event that your emotions do get the better of you in the office, you need to be able to recover. Fortunately, there’s precedent that says that associating these kinds of emotions with your commitment to your job helps others in the office to see them less negatively—research conducted by Harvard Business School says as much. Explain that the stress is borne of a desire to see personal and organizational success, and try to manage your emotions better the next time.

The Right Technology Can Help Cut Down on Workplace Stress

While we would never suggest that all stress will be eliminated with a few IT improvements, it can certainly help simplify a lot of things in the workplace. Reach out to us for assistance in managing your IT so that’s one less source of stress for you and your team. Call (516) 403-9001 today.

Burnout—a psychological process that can impact an employee and lead to stress, exhaustion, depression, and frustration—is a serious threat to any workplace. However, have you ever considered the potential harm that could be done if your IT-focused staff members succumbed to these feelings? Let’s examine the phenomenon of IT burnout, and how we can help fix it.

First, let’s dive a little deeper into burnout itself, and then apply it to your business’ IT team.

What is Burnout, and Where Does It Come From?

Burnout is a complicated animal, as it involves a lot of different feelings and phenomena that vary from person to person. Bill may become cynical about his role and be easily frustrated in the workplace, whereas Olivia may more frequently call in sick and feel depressed when she is in the office. Laura may make uncharacteristic errors in her work. Oliver may seem disconnected from his role.

All of these individuals could be feeling burnout, and just be exhibiting it in a different way. According to a 2018 Gallup survey, nearly 25% of employees felt burnout… and that’s before the concept of the workplace became a lot more complicated and, in many ways, stressful.

In short, burnout is a form of psychological exhaustion brought on by conditions in the workplace.

The reasons that people feel burnt out are just as diverse as the way that these feelings are displayed. While most people might assume that burnout is related to an employee’s workload (as it often is), other reasons can contribute to these feelings as well. If an employee is unsure of their role, for instance, or they feel they are not being adequately represented or treated fairly in the office, they could easily feel burnt out. Maybe they feel they don’t have the time or the support to accomplish what they are meant to accomplish. This is another source of burnout that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Lately, IT Professionals Have Been Hit Especially Hard

While this perhaps isn’t such a surprise, information technology professionals have recently shown particularly high levels of burnout. So much was proven in a global survey conducted by Yerbo, a mental wellbeing platform.

In this study, The State of Burnout in Tech -- 2022 Edition, Yerbo collected 32,644 survey answers from IT professionals from 33 different countries between January and September 2021. We encourage you to review the study’s conclusions for yourself, but we’ve assembled a few highlights here:

Burnout Leads to Four Major Issues for Employees, Each with Their Own Impacts

Based on the study’s findings—which had an entertaining facade put over them reminiscent of the famous cabinet arcade game Pac-Man—their Burnout Index identified four symptoms frequently felt by those suffering:

• Exhaustion often impacts burnt-out IT professionals, with 62% feeling drained physically and emotionally after the workday and 56% being unable to relax once back at home.
• Self-Inefficacy, which can develop into chronic procrastination and Imposter Syndrome, was shown to impact 51% of those surveyed to make them feel as though they were underachieving, and 33% feeling inefficient at work.
• Cynicism builds walls between a burnt-out employee and the rest of their team, causing diminishing engagement amongst 43% of those surveyed and causing 27% to lose sight of their purpose in the workplace.
• Depersonalization, or the emotional shutdown of the burnt-out IT professional, led to 26% of respondents reporting fears of growing harsh with their teammates and a lack of sympathy amongst 22%.

Ultimately, the survey concluded that almost half—42.1%—of the IT employees they surveyed faced a high risk of burnout.

So, How Can You Help Reduce Burnout Amongst Your IT-Focused Employees?

Fortunately, there are a few ways to actively fight against feelings of burnout in your workplace and the team members you’ve hired to work there—including the people who make up your internal IT department.

Eliminate Stress Wherever You Can

Perhaps this is a little bit obvious, but if you can make their jobs even a little bit easier and express your appreciation for their efforts, you can go a long way toward reducing your team’s feelings of burnout. By giving them more specific objectives to meet, providing them with the training they’ll need as time goes on, and otherwise creating a more supportive and comfortable workplace (including sufficient time off), you’ll take away a lot of the stress that burnout feeds on.

Giving Your Team Some Autonomy

Let me ask you something: when was the last time having someone hovering over you, breathing down your neck, motivated you to do something?

I didn’t think so, so why would it ever help motivate your team members? Giving them a degree of self-management and reasonable flexibility will help to keep them engaged and motivated to do their jobs to the best of their ability. Paying them at a rate that reflects this autonomy will help as well.

Provide Them With the Support They Need

If your IT team is feeling overworked by the responsibilities your business presents them with—particularly if it’s to the point that they are working extra hours to keep up and don’t have the opportunity to keep up on their certifications—burnout is certain to set in. We can offer our services to help support your team by taking over some of their workload. Think of us as adding a bunch of employees to your existing team for a single monthly cost. We’ll let your internal IT team do what they do best and pick up whatever is left over, allowing them to succeed, which translates into greater benefits for your business.

Give us a call at (516) 403-9001 to discuss your options with us today!

In any business, the capacity to collaborate is critical to success. In order to do so most optimally, it helps to carry out a few preliminary and overarching practices. Let’s go over a few such practices to help bring your team’s collaborative activities together.

Make Your Expectations Clear

In simple terms, you should make sure your team knows what you want them to be doing. Set the prerogative for your team in no uncertain terms. Emphasizing the focus you want them to commit to teamwork and designing your workplace processes around this goal will ensure they know how they are to proceed.

Equip Your Team with the Right Tools

In addition to making it clear what you want your team to do, it is important that they have the technology needed to do so effectively. Various platforms and standalone software solutions exist that make this cooperation far more easy to accomplish. Acquiring and training your teams to fully utilize these tools will only make it easier for collaboration to make its way into their processes.

Use Various Methods to Collaborate

Speaking of tools, having a variety available for your team’s use—especially those that feature different modes of communication—also makes it more convenient for them to do so. With that kind of accessibility, collaboration can become a more natural reaction to workplace needs.

Understand and Appreciate the Hurdles Your Team Will Face

Finally, you need to take a moment to acknowledge that the adoption process may not go smoothly. Old habits are tough to break, after all, and a lot of people are finding normal work processes more challenging to get through. “Zoom fatigue” is now a recognized thing as well, so accepting whatever feedback (yes, even some complaints) they have to offer will show them that their thoughts matter.

We Can Ensure that Your Team Has the Means to Collaborate

Reach out to our team to find out how we can equip your team with the tools they need. Give us a call at (516) 403-9001 today.

The past several years have brought about a shift in the workforce, and it’s not one that anyone could have seen coming. More people than ever before are leaving their jobs. How can you keep your employees engaged so they have a minimal chance of leaving their position within your company?

Here are some tips you can use to keep your employees from participating in “The Great Resignation.”

What is Driving The Great Resignation?

Several different contributing factors are involved, the result being 47.8 million voluntary job vacancies in 2021 alone. This was the highest number recorded since 2001, and according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2022 will likely not be any better. In February alone, there were 4.4 million resignations in the United States.

This trend is not exclusive to the States, either. The social media posts about people quitting their jobs with the highest levels of engagement are from all over the world.

But Why Are People Quitting?

Some people who are leaving their positions joined during the pandemic, where remote work policies were in place and the people involved–those in the Gen Z age group, for example–are not interested in a commute to the office. On a similar note, many parents, some of them new, are finding that the time spent at home while working remotely helps tremendously to balance their home life responsibilities.

In fact, some are leaving their positions because they are being urged to return to the office, something which is simply not preferable for some workers. In this case, the needs of workers are being sidelined by companies’ needs to control their workforce. This has ultimately led to workers making sacrifices in their flexibilities and pay just to remain in a remote work environment.

Other reasons to leave might include poor workplace interactions and a lack of work/life boundaries. The Great Resignation has forced many people to look at their own priorities and to shift their focus to things that matter most in their lives, and work does not seem to be among them.

How Can I Avoid Losing People?

Simply put, you can do a lot of good by acknowledging that remote work is a possibility for your workforce, and it will do a lot to aid in employee retention. This will be particularly helpful to keep employees on both the younger and the older sides of the spectrum. You might even consider offering hybrid options if you can’t bring yourself to commit wholeheartedly to remote work options.

MSPNetworks can help you implement the technology needed to aid in this shift. To learn more, reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.

Considering what the past year has been like, the idea that workplace burnout has been a hot topic isn’t all that surprising—even though less time has been spent in many offices than almost any other time to date. Regardless, burnout simply isn’t an office issue, meaning that remote workers are still susceptible to its ill effects.

This isn’t something that you want to encourage, so let’s go over what constitutes burnout and how to identify and address it for the benefit and betterment of your team.

What is Burnout?

Let’s face facts—most people that read this blog will have likely felt burnout for themselves at some time or another. Having said that, many likely underestimate the full experience that burnout can bring.

Most probably understand the all-encompassing tiredness that burnout is commonly associated with, both mentally and physically, but this state can also have additional impacts. Burnout also tends to make people feel apathetic and cynical, and it can lead to impaired motivation, lessened self-confidence, and other negative attributes.

When these outcomes come together, it can encourage the development of toxic workplace conditions that—if not avoided entirely—need to be addressed and resolved. To do that, you need to be able to spot burnout as it happens.

Spotting Burnout Amongst Your Team

If you hope to have any chance of catching burnout, you need to have a good awareness of your team members’ (and your own) mental state. Dedicating a few moments to brief self-evaluation to help identify the triggers that dictate how you are engaged (and likewise disengaged) in your work can make a huge difference over time.

With so many people currently feeling a loss of control over many aspects of their life, such stresses need to be kept under control in the office environment. One way to accomplish this is to establish some consistent and predictable routines to be followed in the office, emphasizing control, and decreasing the potency of employee burnout.

Resolving Burnout

Finally, one of the biggest key points to preventing the ill effects of burnout is the importance of taking a step away from it all—particularly when you don’t seem to have any time to waste.

While the human brain is a shockingly complex and capable construct, it does have its limits. Like anything else, it just isn’t built to support 100 percent efficiency, and forcing it will work out about as well as it sounds like it would. Giving yourself some respite in the form of some time off—even a few moments of it during the workday—can help prevent burnout from taking hold. 

On an organizational level, incentivized collaboration and other support incorporated into the workday can help prevent burnout even further.

MSPNetworks can help you where this comes into play. By giving your team the tools necessary to cultivate a cohesive and collaborative environment, we can help reduce the factors that contribute to burnout in general. Find out more by giving us a call at (516) 403-9001 today.

If your business is like most, you and your team likely rely on a schedule to keep your processes moving along efficiently… while also ensuring that everyone has something to work on at any time. However, this is often easier said than done, which is why there are now cloud-based software options that make your scheduling efforts a little smarter.

Let’s take a few moments to discuss what smart scheduling is, and how you and your team can make the most of it.

What is Smart Scheduling?

Technically speaking, smart scheduling is a specific kind of software intended for use within industries that serve consumers with fluctuating demands and that are strongly influenced by different events that may line up with their operations. For instance, ice cream parlors do FAR better in the warmer months, and anyone who has worked in retail can appreciate how much different the holiday season is from the rest of the year. Smart scheduling solutions help to automate the process of scheduling a team to best fit the business’ need, taking these fluctuations into account.

However, if we look to smart scheduling as a process, rather than as a technology, it suddenly becomes far more applicable to all industries. After all, every industry—and individual business—has those external factors that can and do impact their operations.

Smart scheduling is simply the consideration of anticipated demand and adjusting employee hours and responsibilities to match. It’s knowing that the factory next door is going on lunch break in a moment, and ensuring that there’s an employee at each station of the fast food franchise so that the sudden influx of orders can be filled as quickly as possible.

It’s predicting the most likely scenarios and preparing your business appropriately.

How to Smarten Up Your Scheduling Process

Whether or not you’re using a smart scheduling solution, there are some basic tenets that you can follow to ensure that your business (including the employees that work there) is operating at a sustainable maximum output.

1. Define Your Schedule

Take all of the data that you have, concerning your schedule, and bring it all together. This will make it much easier to balance availability to the workload at any given point. For example: if a large project is coming up, but a holiday is as well, it may make sense to take any employees currently assigned to smaller, less-critical projects and delegate them to tasks on the larger one so it can get done. This makes everyone’s goals clear, which can help motivate your team to accomplish them.

2. Be Open to Communication

Regardless of your industry, communication is an indispensable part of your operations each day. Make sure that your schedule clearly (emphasis on the word clearly) defines where people are supposed to be, when, and what they are to accomplish in that given time. This includes those employees who have indicated that they are not available for a period. Failing to apply that information into your schedule will only cause complications and potentially leave you understaffed for what you planned to do. On the other hand, incorporating these considerations into your scheduling will lead to your staff feeling empowered, while reducing the number of unforeseen absences and tardiness.

3. Implement a Scheduling Platform

Many different software titles now exist that make scheduling your employees a lot easier, whether that means defining the hours they are to come in or assigning the tasks they are expected to tackle throughout the workday. Finding one that fits your needs and implementing it will make the entire process much easier for you and your team alike.

MSPNetworks can help you out with this aspect, as well as any other of your IT needs. To learn more about the solutions we have to offer, reach out to us by calling (516) 403-9001.