Like many industries right now, the tech field is struggling to fill empty seats and retain current employees. In fact, a new survey from Gartner reports that only 29 percent of IT employees plan to stay with their current employer. The stress of the shortage and employee turnover is compounded by an ever-increasing demand on companies for new software applications and streamlined user experiences.
In a world where reinforcements may not be arriving anytime soon, how can IT leaders help prevent team burnout while also enabling them to focus on projects that bring the highest value to their organizations?
Treat your developers’ time like any other critical company asset – because that’s exactly what it is. To preserve this asset, recognize that you might need to change or adjust some normal protocols. Consider how you might shift priorities, restructure teams, and introduce new tools to lighten your software team’s workload.
1. Leave 'silo mentality' behind
Too many organizations remain siloed, and this can negatively affect productivity. It can prevent collaboration and communication across different departments, reducing efficiency, trust, and morale among teams.
[Also read Continuous integration: 5 key success factors. ]
Think about the different teams within your organization and how each one relies on the other to deliver products or services. If your developers aren’t communicating with the support teams who are talking to the customers, then issues aren’t being resolved or accolades aren’t being given. Silos are a significant challenge for leaders.
You can address such issues directly by restructuring teams and/or re-prioritizing goals. It’s also important to establish a company-wide culture that supports collaboration. If the IT team wants to collaborate but no other department has the infrastructure set up to do so, successful collaboration won’t happen.
At Boomi, we assembled cross-functional teams to help establish a set of organization-wide priorities. Then we drove alignment from an executive perspective, right down to employees’ objectives and key results and key performance indicators. In a different initiative, we created domain pillars that carried across multiple departments, from product to engineering to marketing to support. This helps ensure that each department stays focused on the same prioritized efforts.
2. Invest in time-saving technology
The move to cloud-native and hybrid environments has changed the workplace. IT leaders now have an enormous range of options when it comes to web applications, cloud platforms, and other services designed to streamline complex container management.
Even if new team members are not available, investing in a platform that automatically scales services could provide some relief for your development team. Services that alleviate arduous infrastructure management can help ensure that developers don’t get overwhelmed and enable them to focus on tasks that more directly benefit the organization.
On average, developers spend 40 hours a week writing and maintaining code. Hyperautomation, using multiple technologies like low code, artificial intelligence, event-driven software architecture, and more allow coders to complete time-consuming tasks like setting up integrations with a single click. This frees them up to spend more time on other aspects of their job.
[ Read also: 5 tips to prevent IT team burnout ]
3. Empower citizen developers to jump in
Every business is a digital business today. In most organizations, there are people in a wide range of roles who are digitally savvy enough to create their own applications with a little help. Low code allows organizations to build custom applications with minimal to zero coding effort. It enables those without professional coding backgrounds – “citizen developers” – to build applications without heavily relying on software teams.
For example, if the HR department needs a new application for basic onboarding practices, they can spin it up on their own, freeing up the developer’s time so they can focus on innovation. This happened in our own HR department: Our Chief Culture Officer led her team in creating an onboarding solution with low code to streamline the process for our new employees and our HR team.
[ Related read: 6 predictions for open source tech in 2022 ]
Adopting new technology like low code company-wide does not solve the developer shortage issue, but it can definitely save time and effort and lighten the workload of overworked developers. A low code development environment can make it quick and easy for organizations to connect everything from cloud or on-premise applications to web, mobile, IoT, analytics, and other systems.
There’s no quick fix for the developer shortage. While these examples can alleviate the burden on developer teams, they don’t take the place of hiring more skilled people. In the meantime, IT leaders can accommodate their current developer workforce by shifting priorities and re-prioritizing goals, restructuring teams, and introducing new tools, while still getting the job done.
Today’s workplace and workforce has changed, introducing new challenges. How organizations adapt and overcome these new challenges is the game-changer.
[ How can automation free up more staff time for innovation? Get the free eBook: Managing IT with Automation. ]
