Can We Slow Down Tech Employee Burnout?
A shortage of skilled workers increases the burden on those in tech roles. Businesses recognize they need to reduce employee burnout to retain their top talent, but surveys find that they’re not doing enough.
In the IT industry, there is always a new crisis to attend to. Whether it’s a massive data breach, an unexpected outage after a software update, or the need to correct a simple mistake before it turns into a catastrophe, tech employees spend most of their time being reactive. More IT pros are reporting an increase in factors that lead to employee burnout, like a lack of resources, a lack of clarity, and an absence of support.
Over time, these factors add up. ResumeBuilder has warned nearly a third of workers plan to quit their jobs (28%) in 2024. This is the same percentage that reported quitting one or more jobs between 2021 and 2022, a period dubbed the “Great Resignation.” Surprisingly, one in 10 workers dislike their current job so much they are willing to quit without another job lined up. That’s a sure sign that employee burnout is rampant.
Beyond Benefits
Can businesses plug the burnout-led exodus by raising salaries and offering new benefits? ResumeBuilder’s survey found that 56% of those who want to quit feel underpaid, and 44% want better benefits, but that doesn’t tell the entire story. 43% of workers are leaving because their work is overly stressful. At the same time, research firm Gallup found that employee engagement has not returned to pre-pandemic levels. In fact, in the first quarter of 2024, employee engagement was at an 11-year low.
So, how can businesses find a balance between the conflicting needs of workers?
There isn’t a quick fix. It took time to get into this predicament, and it will take time to reverse it. Reducing employee burnout will require more than increasing employee compensation. Employees want to have a say in decision making, know that they are valued, and enjoy the work culture. Companies also need to invest in modern technology solutions to reduce the strain on employees, automate repetitive tasks, and enable employees to focus on priority tasks.
Replacing workers can cost one-half to two times the employee’s annual salary, according to research by the Society for Human Resources Management. Technology companies pay the highest wages among all sectors, and high attrition rates can severely impact their budgets.
Employee Burnout: Make Life Easier for IT Workers
In the State of Cybersecurity 2024 report, ISACA found that 66% of survey respondents feel that their level of work stress is higher now than five years ago. Most (81%) said the threat landscape keeps getting more complex.
Allen McNaughton, technical sales director at Infoblox Federal, says that the talent pool has faced unprecedented demands as the pandemic forced understaffed cybersecurity teams to extend security to cover the blending of corporate and home technologies as millions of employees worked remotely—all while adjusting to the challenges of remote work themselves.
“To compound these difficulties, malicious actors have pounced, preying on these new work arrangements, hastily set-up network architectures, and fears of the pandemic to launch a growing number of cyber-attacks. All of this has culminated in a cybersecurity workforce that is stretched out, overburdened, and burnt out.”
Juggling Too Many Security Tasks
Considering even the C-level is reeling under pressure, it is not surprising that organizations are focused on onboarding technologies to automate manual security tasks. A recent global survey of nearly 5000 respondents by Aberdeen Strategy & Research revealed that planned investments in increasing the use of intelligence and automation for manual security tasks were the second-highest choice globally (37%), just a whisker behind “increasing the use of cloud service providers” at 38%. In the EMEA and APAC regions, it was number one.
Derek Brink, VP and research fellow at Aberdeen Strategy & Research, says that the threat intelligence domain features a mountain of manual tasks that require a round-the-clock by technical staff based on hierarchy.
For instance, an in-house Security Operations Center (SOC) is composed of Level 1 analysts who support the real-time monitoring, detection, initial investigation, and escalation of security-related incidents, and Level 2/3 analysts who support the in-depth prioritization, investigation, containment, and remediation of an Incident Response team.
“All of these tasks require processing a massive volume of detailed threat intelligence data from a wide variety of sources — i.e., the data needs to be normalized, correlated, verified, enriched, prioritized, and framed in the specific context of the organization’s technical infrastructure and business environment.
Automation: Eliminate the Tedious Manual Tasks
“Automating this processing as much as possible allows analysts to maximize the time they spend on higher-value activities, which is what the people in these roles would prefer to spend their time on — not to mention that automation makes it faster, more scalable, less costly, more consistent, and less subject to human error,” Brink says.
According to McNaughton, technology that automates lower-order tasks is relatively easy to deploy, frees up workers’ valuable time, and removes the potential for human error by combing through different risks. Aside from automating manual tasks, CISOs should recognize the power of context to help workers better understand the threats they face and enable them to make better, more accurate, and faster decisions. If context follows automation, security teams will save hours chasing down the most rudimentary threats they can quickly remediate via technology. It’s less likely for employee burnout to occur when your team feels like they are in control fo their workload.
Coordination Through Orchestration
Cybersecurity teams should also focus on using technology solutions that leverage the expertise of workers. For instance, workflow prioritization can help identify and remediate the most dangerous, time-consuming threats instead of randomly remediating threats based on when they’re discovered.
McNaughton says that technology solutions in the market can provide automation, orchestration, and context. For instance, organizations can onboard solutions that detect when the DNS Firewall blocks a request to a malicious site and automatically triggers a response to the Network Access Control system to quarantine that user into a sandbox until an analyst can further research it. This will help dramatically reduce the time and effort needed to track down and isolate infected devices.
Organizations can also use automated vulnerability scanners to reduce manual work and secure the network. For example, McNaughton suggests a quick tip to improve security posture is use orchestration to scan devices as soon as they connect. Security teams can leverage an orchestration flow where the DHCP server automatically identifies new connections and immediately triggers a scan.
Employee Burnout: The Software Developer’s Concerns
Reveal’s Top Software Development Challenges for 2024 survey offers unique insights into the challenges faced by software developers. The need to develop new skills – particularly those in artificial intelligence – is rising. 75% of software developers surveyed are using generative AI to create software. In fact, half of those surveyed said the reason for using AI is to increase developer productivity. At the same time, AI is also one of the biggest software challenges as organizations struggle to incorporate it into the development process.
The survey also found that the top business challenge for the technology industry is working with limited resources. This knocked “recruiting developers with the right skills” out of the top spot, which it has held for two years.
Shifting Workloads to Citizen Developers
To circumvent these challenges, organizations are turning to low-code/no-code (app builder) tools. They’re also working with generative AI tools that can help citizen developers build simple apps quickly, without the help of a developer.
“In today’s tight job market, where demand for experienced employees outstrips supply, organizations are turning to new solutions that can address insufficient skills, solve problems, and save money. There is a growing need for innovations that can help meet the demand for building applications faster and with fewer resources,” said Jason Beres, SVP of Developer Tools, Infragistics.
Most organizations are also planning to introduce digital workplace platforms. These tools streamline apps into a single digital space. It allows users to corral multiple tools into one place, like dashboards, chat, and task management. “Digital workplace platforms can help organize workflow, files, communication, and even manage and analyze data from a single app. In this new digital workplace, the less time people spend app-switching, the more time they’ll spend being productive,” Beres added.
Software developers are also relying more on business intelligence and embedded analytics tools to improve productivity, understand business problems, and make better business decisions. The survey found that 73% of software developers currently incorporate embedded analytics into their apps, and 72% expect their company’s focus on business intelligence to increase. Organizations need to invest in these tools and capabilities to ensure their developers are productive, efficient, and, above all, valued.
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