The switch to hybrid work allowed businesses to test various hybrid working models. However, a new work environment, coupled with rising demand and the need to modernize, placed immense pressure on IT workers, resulting in an alarming workforce exodus in 2021. Businesses now recognize the need to reduce employee burnout and retain top talent. Here, experts discuss the best technology solutions that businesses should adopt in 2022 to reduce workforce fatigue and enhance productivity.
In 2021, as the world entered the second year of a forced shift to off-site work, a new trend, as disruptive as the lockdowns of 2020, began to take shape. The alarming rise of workforce exodus impacted businesses across sectors. Â
The Looming Workforce Exodus in 2022 and What’s Causing It
ResumeBuilder has warned that 23% of workers will seek a new job in 2022, continuing the trend from the second half of 2021 that saw approximately 20 million people quit their jobs. The hardest-hit sectors will be retail (31%), food and hospitality (29%), education (23%), office and administrative support (23%), and business and finance (22%). Career strategist Carolyn Kleiman told ResumeBuilder that these sectors were “hit the hardest with burnout and staff shortages during the pandemic. This means extra work for those who show up, which leads to more burnout.â€
Can businesses plug the burnout-led exodus by raising salaries and offering new benefits, especially in the IT sector? In a survey, ResumeBuilder found that 50% of those who want to quit are seeking better pay and benefits, but that doesn’t tell the entire story. A third of all workers are leaving because they are not happy with the working conditions, and many more are doing so because they are being forced to work in conditions that don’t suit them. For instance, nearly 30% want to quit because they want to continue working remotely, and 17% will leave because they don’t want to continue working remotely.
So how can businesses find a balance between the conflicting needs of workers?Â
Research firm Gallup found that employee engagementOpens a new window is the key. Employees who feel valued won’t quit even if another company offers them a 20% salary hike. The downside is that 63% of employees don’t feel valued or heard. “People are calling it the “Great Resignation,†and as the Gallup data show, it’s less an industry, role or pay issue than it is a workplace issue. The highest quit rate is among not engaged and actively disengaged workers,†the firm said.
The solution is two-fold. Organizations need to increase employee compensation, build an enabling culture, and give employees a greater say in decision-making. They 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.Â
Gallup says replacing workers costs one-half to two times the employee’s annual salary. Technology companies, in particular, pay the highest wages among all sectors, and high attrition rates can severely impact their budgets. For IT decision-makers, now is the time to invest in policies and solutions to keep workers engaged and productive.Â
Toolbox previously covered in-depth what employees expect from their organizations to help IT decision-makers adopt the right strategies to prevent burnout and manage attrition. Here, we gauge from experts the top technology solutions that businesses should adopt in 2022 to reduce workforce fatigue and enhance productivity.
See More: How to Handle Stress Among Remote Workers? Experts Weigh In
Making the IT Security Worker’s Life Easier
If it was not under tremendous strain before, Cisco says the cybersecurity industry is “struggling with elevated anxiety levels†following the past two years’ events. Half of the 100 directors, vice presidents, and C-Level executives the company surveyed admitted toOpens a new window experiencing “extreme stress or burnout while working in cybersecurity.†A majority of them cited staff shortage, an influx of threats/alerts/incidents, and inadequate work-life balance as the sources of their anxiety.
Allen McNaughtonOpens a new window , director of systems engineering at Infoblox Federal, says that over the past year, 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.Â
“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.â€
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 survey of 4,733 respondents worldwide by Aberdeen Strategy & Research revealed that planned investments in increasing the use of intelligence and automation for manual security tasks was 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 BrinkOpens a new window , VP and research fellow at Aberdeen Strategy & Research, says that the threat intelligence domain itself features a mountain of manual tasks that need to be carried out 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.
“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 any human error 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 not waste hours chasing down the most rudimentary threats they can quickly remediate via technology.
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.Â
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. McNaughton adds that they can quickly, easily, and automatically improve their security posture by scanning a device as soon as it connects to the network by leveraging an orchestration flow where the DHCP server automatically identifies the new machine and triggers the scan.
See More: Top Tech Skills to Master If You Want the Big Fat Paycheck in 2022
Understanding the Software Developer’s Concerns
Reveal’s third annual “Top Software Development Challenges for 2022†surveyOpens a new window , featuring responses from 2,015 software developers and IT professionals, offers unique insights into the challenges faced by software developers in 2022 and how organizations can address these to keep developers motivated, engaged, and productive.Â
The need to develop new applications and web services to meet customers’ emerging needs is rising, and according to Reveal’s survey, 41% of software developers expect to take on new projects in 2022 compared to 22% in 2021. However, a significant shortage of skilled and experienced software developers makes it difficult for organizations to maintain the momentum achieved in previous years.
Taking the workforce exodus into account turns the challenge into a question of organizations’ very existence. The survey found that while the top challenge is recruiting developers with the right skills, other significant challenges include maintaining current talent and not having enough time to get work done. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are almost 200,000 difficult to replace openings every year for software developers. However, retirement, workforce exodus, and workers moving to different occupations exacerbate the problem.
To circumvent these challenges, organizations are using low-code/no-code (app builder) tools, design-to-code platforms and other software that will work for citizen developers. “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 Developer Tools, Infragistics.
Most organizations are also planning to incorporate digital workplace platforms in 2022 that streamline their apps into digital workplaces that combine multiple capabilities, such as data dashboards, chat, content and task management in one place. “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 data analytics tools to improve productivity, understand business problems, and make better business decisions. The survey found that 77% of software developers are currently incorporating business intelligence apps into their products, and 45% plan to use embedded analytics in 2022. 71% also expect their focus on business intelligence to increase this year. Organizations need to invest in these tools and capabilities to ensure their developers are productive, efficient, and above all, valued.
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