Why your IT metrics are burning out your team

The metrics you're using to measure IT success are quietly destroying your department.

Engaged workers are stronger performers, with 90% reporting they regularly accomplish more than expected, according to a report from Info-Tech Research Group. But here's what nobody talks about: IT has crossed the line from engaged to over-engaged. It's breaking your people, and they're checking out.

A separate DHR Global study found 83% of respondents report some degree of burnout, with the top drivers being overwhelming workload, working too many hours, lack of work-life balance and lack of recognition.

Many IT workers must adhere to service-level agreements (SLAs) when managing IT services. Standard SLA metrics might include service provider response time, ticket resolution time and first-call resolution. But businesses also often saddle IT employees with additional goals, such as a set number of cases to close each month and maintaining high customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores.

Your metrics are at war with each other, and your employees are the casualties.

This is Goodhart's Law in action: 'When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.' When you start using a measurement to judge success, workers will focus on improving that number instead of doing what actually matters, and you don't learn the truth about what is really happening.

You optimized for ticket closure rates, so you know your team closes tickets fast, but you don't know if they solve problems well. You demanded high CSAT scores, so they spent extra time on each interaction, blowing past resolution targets and case-close goals. You need both quantitative and qualitative assessments to run a successful department.

When was the last time you sat with your front-line IT employees and actually watched them work? If you can't remember, then you're far too removed from the reality your metrics are creating. You need to stay plugged in to understand the pain points of employees reporting to you. If you understand the issues, you can take steps to adjust metrics, SLAs and staffing levels.

Does most of your staff work overtime each month and still not hit their case-close goals? Your department is understaffed. Hire more people and lower your targets.

Does the ticket queue never shrink despite constant activity? You're understaffed. Hire more people and be more intentional about where cuts are made during layoffs.

Are customers rude to your staff because SLAs are unclear? Rewrite them. Clarity means protection for your team.

It's time to move beyond just SLAs and explore adopting experience-level agreements (XLAs) to measure the human and emotional effects of services the business provides. XLAs can measure user satisfaction, employee sentiment and effort required to complete tasks. And these results can often uncover actionable data to improve business outcomes. SLAs tell you if tickets closed on time. XLAs tell you why tickets aren't closed on time.  

Humans are not machines, yet they are still managed as such -- measuring response times and other actions. These employees have feelings and need to be heard when processes don't go as leadership intended. Your IT staff isn't a cost center to be optimized -- they are the ones who keep your customers from leaving. The sales team may bring new business into a company, but the IT department is what makes customers stay.

Your IT team isn't asking for a million dollars -- just to be treated as the humans they are and not ticket-closing machines. Ignore that, and you may learn an expensive lesson. Institutional knowledge doesn't just walk out the door -- it walks to your competitors.

Sarah Amsler is a senior managing editor for the IT Strategy team at TechTarget.