Opinion: How to empower and energise your IT department personnel - without any new spend - using one word.
In life, trust is earned not given. But in a workplace, it must be the other way around: trust in your team must be a given until it's broken. Trust is free.
Trust.
In life, trust is earned not given. But in a workplace, it must be the other way around: trust in your team must be a given until it's broken. Trust is free.
The staff: You've hired technical engineers to work for your organisation. They get the work done. They are driven and for the most part great employees.
The IT organisation: The IT organisation has somewhat strict segregation of roles and functions. The IT organisation likes to keep people in boxes, where people are discouraged from briefly changing lanes, where you have a "team that does X and another team that does Y". In short, the IT organisation doesn't work on trust. It works on the opposite.
Those great employees will not stay at that IT organisation, because you demonstrably don't trust them. It's as simple as that.
Some of this segregation is no doubt a result of practical application of company policy, but more typically is a result of a lack of steer from above, and personnel who have been conditioned to be fearful to delegate or relinquish responsibilities out of fear of losing their job, or comfortable work environment.
This is what you can change: you can provide them with opportunity. Opportunity can't be a fanciful carrot-on-a-stick, something promised but never realised. True opportunity comes from an open, conversational workplace where trust not only exists between engineers, and between engineers and management, but also between the various layers of the management onion.
Trust breeds opportunity. Opportunity breeds trust.
IT Service Desk is your organisations exclusive talent breeding pool.
The IT Service Desk is the true lifeblood of the IT organisation.
A breeding pool for new talent who can be shaped specifically to your organisation who understand how your organisation works better than most.
Give them opportunities to learn, to try more complex tasks, and to shadow technical engineers. Across the IT organisation. Trust that given the chance they will find their niche and in time become your next rockstar. Whether that's as a systems admin or as a data engineer, or as a developer. Trust that they will still get the day-to-day functions done.
Trust that their new expertise will give them the tools to better do their current role as well as their potential future role.
Get ticket flow automated yesterday.
Is your service desk a "log & flog" team – where the main function of the role is to capture user incidents/requests and assign out tickets to other departments? Chasing other departments for progress?
Trust that ITSD management and/or experienced SD staff know where 95% of tickets need to go. Use that knowledge to deliver automation.
Not only will this result in quicker turnaround, but will free up more time for your SD team to explore their talents and future. Again, trust that their new expertise will give them the tools to better do their current role, too.
Keep providing opportunity as seniority increases. In fact, give even more opportunity.
Integrate your second line function much closer with third line. Trust that given access to a system and the documentation, that they are perfectly capable engineers who can learn quickly.
If your second line engineers aren't spending at least a couple days a month shadowing third line or project engineers, start doing that today.
The conversations will start and they will be energised and interested. When they indicate that they feel they can do it: Trust them, and get them access and approval to work on bigger tasks.
Trust that they will prove themselves given the opportunity.
For the higher levels of technical seniority, lets talk IT project work.
You've got a big IT project that's been going and going. Some of it is already production, some of it is still on the drawing board. Most parts are somewhere in between.
All organisations have these behemoths.
Trust that despite the fact your project engineers are still working on it, that your IT Ops functions can pick up some of the responsibility. If your project engineers are working daily on maintaining the deliverable, that's IT operations, not project work.
By keeping things within the project team, you are paralysing progress and creating future technical debt.
You're also wasting your project engineers time, in turn preventing them from delivering value to the organisation. Trust that some of the deliverables can be handled by senior technical engineers elsewhere in the IT organisation.
Project engineers: deliver, handover, deliver, handover, repeat, repeat, repeat.
Trust your teams to deliver on change.
Your change management workflow needs to be built on trust.
Your engineers know what they are doing. Their RFCs are detailed and contain decent rollback.
Trust that your change management team can automate a lot of the workflow and trust them to get on with doing that.
Get your CAB meetings virtualised and trust that the submitted changes will get approved there. Trust that anyone at CAB will speak up if they have an issue. Trust that CAB should be something that happens on demand, not once per week.
Trust that it's alright that you haven't had a CAB for 6 months once everything is in place.
Line management? Trust that they know their staff better than anyone else.
Your IT management structure has been built to reflect the needs of the organisation - which makes sense.
Trust that the person in charge of the team they've been assigned knows what the team needs. Trust that they know each and every member and that they have the insight to correctly reflect the needs of their staff.
Empower them to make decisions in the grey areas of company policy, trust them to do the right thing. Trust that by keeping things informal you're developing a company culture where the staff can trust management.
Trust that telling the truth and telling it early is always the correct choice. Trust that good staff stick around for good managers.
Trust that when a manager is making a recommendation or pleading with human resources to let them handle something, that they can be trusted with the decisions.
In short, create company culture built on trust.
When every role is built on trust, you gain that coveted "work culture" that's all the rage.
It's not a buzz word or something artificially created. It's organic and comes from making meaningful changes to empower people and trust them as intelligent people capable of making great work happen.
People who take the work seriously, but don't take themselves seriously.
People who have fun and enjoy coming to work, by keeping it relaxed, and keeping people approachable at all levels.
Trust that by doing so you're creating an open environment where people feel comfortable tackling the difficult questions.
It all comes back to trust.
Trust that your hiring process works well enough that you hired decent people. Trust that the only thing holding them back is the lack of opportunity.
Trust that your organisation will reward great work and growing expertise.
Trust that your team members will reach out when they need help, and won't when they don't.
Trust them to get shit done.
Trust your staff, always.
If your team member needs the morning off for a dentist appointment, or to look after the kids, or whatever else, trust that they have already explored all other options. Trust that they will be able to deliver the work promised.
Trust that the rest of the team will be able to pick up the slack if not, and trust that they will do so happily when they trust that they themselves will be given the same trust.
Trust that when they wish to work from home, they will be even more productive than in the office.
Trust that when they tell you they need new hardware or software, that they are already trying their best with what they have.
Trust that they appreciate it.
In short: When it comes to any element involving personnel, trust them and give them opportunity off the back of that trust.
You will be rewarded with the most driven, satisfied and loyal IT department.
Ryan Drake
Infrastructure Insider - Editor-in-Chief
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