6 Steps for CIOs To Keep Their IT Staff Happy

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According to a recent Yerbo survey, 40% of IT professionals are at high risk of burnout. In fact, and perhaps even more alarming, 42% of them plan to quit their company in the next six months. And yet, according to Deloitte, 70% of professionals across all industries feel their employers are not doing enough to prevent or alleviate burnout.

CIOs should take this statistic seriously. Otherwise, they could be dealing with the business costs of churn, which include loss of internal knowledge and the cost of replacing employees, both resulting in putting strategic plans on hold.

So, what’s a CIO to do? Here are six steps ambitious CIOs like you can take to battle burnout in the IT department and keep their staff happy.

This blog post is a short excerpt of the eBook “Keeping Your IT Staff Happy: How CIOs Can Turn the Burnout Tide in 6 Steps”. You can read the entire eBook, with more details and an in-depth action plan, here.

Step 1: Let Your Network Do the Heavy Lifting

If your IT team is receiving negative feedback from users, they might be feeling stressed out. Poor network performance, security false positives and constant user complaints can leave them feeling dread and anxiety about that next “emergency” phone call.

SASE can help ease this pressure. SASE provides reliable global connectivity with optimized network performance, 99.999% uptime and a self-healing architecture that ensures employees can focus on advancing the business, instead of tuning and troubleshooting network performance. With SASE, IT managers can provide a flawless user experience and business continuity, while enjoying a silent support desk.

Keep your IT Staff happy: How CIOs Can Turn the Burnout Tide in 6 Steps | Get the eBook

Step 2: Leverage Automation to Maximize Business Impact

IT professionals are often caught in a cycle of mundane activities, leaving them feeling unchallenged. Instead of having IT teams fill the time with endless maintenance and monitoring, CIOs can focus their IT teams on work that achieves larger business objectives. SASE automates repetitive tasks, which frees up IT to focus on strategic business objectives. In addition, the repetitive tasks become less prone to manual errors.

Step 3: Eliminate Networking and Security Solution Sprawl with Converged SASE

IT teams are swamped with point solutions, each corresponding to a specific, narrow business problem. All of these solutions create a complicated mix of legacy machines, hardware and software; which are difficult for IT to operate, maintain, support and manage. 

With SASE, CIOs can transform their network into a single platform with a centralized management application. IT can now gain a holistic view of their architecture, and enjoy easy management and maintenance.

Step 4: Ensure Business Continuity and Best-in-class Security with ZTNA

Working from anywhere has doubled IT’s workload. They are now operating in reactive mode, attempting to support end-user connectivity and security through VPNs that were not built to support such scale. 

SASE is the answer for remote work, enabling users to work seamlessly and securely from anywhere. Eliminating VPN servers removes the need to backhaul traffic and improves end-user performance. Traffic is authenticated with Zero Trust and inspected with advanced threat defense tools to reduce the attack surface.

Step 5: Minimize Security Vulnerabilities Through Cloudification and Consolidation

Global branches, remote work, and countless integrations between network and security point products have created an expanding attack surface. For IT, this means fighting an uphill battle without the tools they need to win. 

A SASE or SSE solution helps IT apply consistent access policies, avoid misconfigurations and achieve regulatory compliance. This also allows them to prevent cyber attacks in real time and helps the organization remain secure and prevent compliance issues.

Step 6: Bridge Your Team’s Skillset Gap and Invest in Their Higher Education

Skills gaps occur for a number of reasons. Whatever the reason, this can leave your IT team members feeling overwhelmed and professionally unfulfilled, resulting in them leaving the organization.

Providing training and professional development helps IT professionals succeed, which in turn, may motivate them to remain in their roles longer, according to a recent LinkedIn survey. These benefits are felt everywhere and by everyone from the IT professional who receives more at-work satisfaction, to CIOs who don’t have to backfill the skills gaps externally. This enables the organization to achieve ambitious plans for growth and business continuity through technology.To read more about how CIOs can tackle IT burnout head on, click here to access the full eBook.