You’ve communicated your vision for your IT department, provided a clear set of metrics and empowered them to go after specific goals. It’s easy to think that with these key ingredients for building an environment for high IT performance, you should be seeing impressive returns on that investment. Instead, these may be the bare minimum for keeping your team functioning.
In order to move the ball forward with teams that introduce a momentum for innovation and a pursuit of seamless execution, there’s more work to be done. Try implementing a few strategies for improving IT performance:
Offer transparency when communicating goals. It’s common for IT leaders to share the goals of the organization but often with a lot of graphs and stiff language communicated through a slide presentation. Try something more transparent, step away from the screen after your presentation, and simply talk to your team about how their objectives impact the bigger goals of the organization. You should also do this at the individual level and have conversations with employees to be sure they know where they fit and that they have the training to fulfill the expectations of the goal.
Equip your team for success. Make sure that IT performance is not being hindered by outdated software or devices. You can also improve employee satisfaction by automating monotonous tasks that take them away from more complex work. Investing in a set of continuous deployment tools, for instance, can help employees escape the mundane.
Choose the right metrics. It’s probably relatively easy for your team to identify a few key performance indicators (KPIs) that are important to your team. What’s harder is designating the KPIs that matter to your larger organization. Set up a regular review of your metrics to determine if they’re still playing a central role in helping your company reach critical goals.
Watch for signs of burnout. While working hard as a team can be rewarding and inspiring, it’s easy to push past that sweet spot to overwork. In order to be sure your team members are not burning out, you’ll need to spend time with them. Grab team members for a quick lunch or coffee break. IT is often tasked with short-term, last-minute demands that don’t take into consideration the projects they are already working to complete. It’s easy for your team members to slip into a phase of being overworked. For a short period, it’s probably manageable, but chronic overwork will affect your department’s performance.
Avoid micromanaging your team. It’s simple in concept, and everyone knows the value of a manager that strikes the right level of involvement, but it’s hard to execute when you’re the one in the driver’s seat. Don’t jump in to help every time you see a team member stumble. Your IT performance may be better overall if you can weather some learning opportunities mixed in.
Providing great IT performance is about more than data transmissions and load times. Giving your team what they need to reach a stage of innovation requires a high level of transparency, equipping the team for high performance and a good barometer for employee burnout.
To learn more about equipping your team with the right software tools for better IT performance, contact us at Access One. We look forward to discussing your business goals and the resources you need to achieve them.
