It can be tempting to try to improve your company’s balance sheet by keeping your workforce as lean as possible, especially when it comes to highly skilled information technology workers. But while you feel you’re making an efficient choice, in the long run, you’re really shooting yourself in the foot. Here are some of the consequences of an understaffed IT department:
It stresses your current employees.
Trying to juggle an amount of work meant for a larger staff can put a great deal of stress on your employees. Stress can lead to employee burnout, which often causes people to consider turning in their resignations. If this happens, not only will you have to find and hire replacements, but you will also have to deal with an even smaller staff until you can get your new employees trained.
It makes it harder to achieve goals.
If there’s a technical project you want to launch or an app you want to create, you need man-hours, which are a limited resource that directly correlate to the number of your employees. If you’re on a tight timeline and you have your small staff work overtime, that can get very costly very quickly. In the long run, it’s often more cost effective to just hire additional staff to help you meet your deadlines. Many companies will look to temporary or contract IT professionals to help fill their staffing shortage. While the additional staff will impact your bottom line, it is often much cheaper than paying overtime wages.
It stunts your growth as a company.
You need adequate resources to continue growing your business, and there’s no way around that. This is especially important for your IT department, because information technology skills are critical in today’s business environment. From security to communications to customer service, IT backs up critical areas that you need in place to be able to set bigger goals and work to achieving them.
Is your small IT department holding your company back from achieving its full potential? Contact an IT staffing specialist at Contemporary Staffing Solutions to find the right highly trained technical candidates to add to your team.