A Happy You is Good for the Org, Too

At Recast, we often get asked about the Right Click Tools in terms of dollars and time saved, and how we can help admins like you be more productive in the time you work.  It’s important stuff, maximizing your time and effort as a System Administrator can have sweeping effects on the productivity of the entire organization.  That being said, today’s blog post is all about something much more important and with much more impact: being happy. Being happy and engaged in the work is critically important… Especially in IT.

Systems management is hard. Somewhere between all the technology changes, revolving security concerns, people/process issues, organizational policy/politics, and myriad of ways things can just go wrong– there’s a real person who wants to achieve their career and personal goals.  Too often in our industry, the needs of the person get lost in favor of the needs of the organization or the needs of the technology, but this thinking is actually backward for those seeking high performance from their sysadmin teams.

In an 3 year survey report published by Towers Perrin ISR, organizations with high employee engagement had nearly 6% better operating margin and 4% better profit margins compared to those with low employee engagement.  In a field that already has the potential for sweeping impact on an organization, making sure that sysadmins enjoy and believe in their work is critical for maximizing organizational success.  The fact is, when sysadmin teams are engaged in their work, magic happens.  Systems are more secure.  Downtime is decreased.  End users are better trained in the use of their technology tools and therefore more effective at their jobs.  The organization stands out from the competition because the team is more effective.

You can’t be happy if everything is on fire. This might sound familiar: Well-trained, highly skilled SysAdmin is hired on and tasked with managing an environment.  SysAdmin quickly realizes this actually means putting out metaphorical fires in the environment all day, while simultaneously being blamed for starting those fires in the first place. In this scenario, job satisfaction, happiness, and engagement are going to be hard goals to reach!  The solution is to get out of the business of firefighting, but you can’t stop firefighting unless you can stop the fires from starting, but you can’t stop the fires from starting until you have time to stop firefighting.  It’s a recipe for dissatisfaction, organizational friction, and high rates of turnover.

This was the reason we created the Right Click Tools from the beginning– if we can give you the tools you need as a SysAdmin to be more productive/proactive, offer easier ways for you to get the data you need to make better decisions, and improve/integrate with the tools you already use, you might just have a chance of shifting from firefighting to fire prevention.  Tools like the Status Message viewer– which lets you troubleshoot a task sequence in seconds rather than hours.  Or the enhanced Query Tool, which lets you surface data more effectively, sort/filter results to where they need to be, and then take action immediately.  You can learn more about the what the tools can do to help you get out of the firefighting business by scheduling a demo.