Discussion on:

How do I keep staff "busy" without creating meaningless "busywork?"

As an IT Supervisor, one of my biggest challenges is finding meaningful tasks for staff to do while waiting for calls during a Help Desk shift, or between project tasks. I hate even the thought of "makework" just for the sake of looking busy; that seems meaningless to me, and I believe it can lead to negativity. But I also think it's unhealthy for the workplace to have staff sitting around browsing non work-related Internet sites, or just twiddling their thumbs during work hours.

This could be a simple matter of ineptitude on my part, but I'm betting I'm not the only one who struggles with this. Anyone have some good suggestions for meaningful activities?

How about buying some training CDs/DVDs, A+, Network+, Server+, etc? Especially if they've got time on their hands. Also, does your company have an Intranet site? If so, have them rework your Intranet, update the frequently asked questions section. Have them set up a test lab for them to test patches/security updates, new software, and open source software (research OSS that would save the company $$$$, I'm sure your CEO/CFO/CIO would appreciate that because it all boils down the almighty dollar. I'm sure they'd appreciate the training, the ability to set up a test lab, and/or update your company's Intranet site. How about having your staff review your policies and update if necessary. You failed to mention how many staff are on duty when they're on the Help Desk shift. Does your company's help desk software also include the hardware/software inventory? Do you subscribe to industry trade mags? If not, subscribe to some, especially the ones that are meaningful to your company. I'm not a supervisor and I don't aspire to be one, but I can think of tons of "busywork" that is work related, as mentioned previously. Good luck to you! Let me know how this pans out.

... could provide some credit-worthy training at your location? Or direction to college level courses on CD/DVD?

It?s a good idea, but you can learn from internet. It?s full of information, technical news and so on. On other idea is to practice the Help Desk work for example at Techrepublic at Tech Q&A. After me it?s a very good practice and learn possibilities.

How well is your network documented? I am a small shop just me and a part time student and while there are times that we are backed up for a week, there are other times when we twiddle our thumbs for a week. Training is fine as long as it is self paced because you have to be ready to drop what you are doing and take care of a client.
so document the network, write scripts to check patch levels, server disk space, monitor backups, etc. Don't worry about working yourself out of a job, if you do well you find areas that are out of date and need upgrades, other areas where stuff just isn't working quite right... for the self starter, there will always be something to do.

I agree with all of the above. Training and documentation should fill in the down time gaps. I have my staff working on several projects that are important but can be put aside momentarily for urgent help desk matters. This is not busy work but the work of IT. You are lucky that you have the time. Use it wisely.

My IT manager gives me research projects. A few weeks ago he had me research competitors and compile a list of service offerings. S and M then took the info and put price points for them. Have them do research you don't have time to do. I love it cause I get exposure, an idea of whats going on upstairs, and feel good when I see a presentation with my information in it.

If this is this much of a problem then maybe down sizing your staff is an option.

Otherwise sign them up for a training course on internet or company classes. But be sure they can and do this in spare time. Or get them working on updating manuals or process papers.

Downsize? To many times that is the reflex reaction of managers. That is a cop-out and a sign of a BAD manager/management.

One of the first things I was taught as a manager is that 9 out of 10 times, when an employee is fired or laid off it is because of bad MANAGEMENT. Like it or not, admit it or not, managers have a responsiblity to their employees.

Staff are people, not a commodity. You don't simply reduce your inventory when it slows down.

Let them study, the research idea is a fantastic and even better idea. When an employee feels valued they work better, act more ethicly and are more loyal.

I agree Downsizing is usually used to commonly. Many managers look to reduce staff at the first sign of slowdowns, and often end up hiring someone else a few months later that does not know the office setup. Or, they downsize and let call times slip when it gets busy again.
Anyway, for this post. My suggestion is research and training. However, often too much training time will bore someone to death, so see what kinds of smaller projects they may be interested in. Usually if interest is involved, a better attitude is applied in learning.
For me, I have taught basic scripting creation to someone by helping with a few requests. Having small batch files to do common tasks is great for everyone, so if they create them (even with a little help), they feel more accomplished. I also setup someone to be the 'registry guy', who is also the BSOD guy.

One of the best qualities about my job is when things are slow I am allowed to research what I like. A few weeks ago it was building an AJAX library, after that it was researching development of a Mac OSX app. Simple thing like that keep me busy and benefit the company I work for. Years ago, every Friday afternoon (work depending) I was allowed to spend that time doing R&D. You may not have the choice but when I feel like I am allowed to research whatever I like, I feel empowered and happy.

As for starters read my messages again.

As I stated:
"If this is much off a problem then maybe down sizing your staff is an option."
Meaning if you have no other solution to the problem then the choice between going bankrupt or saving the company then, I think, it is wise to let go some of your employees.

But if you can avoid this then do.
Let them do meaningful work. Work that normally is not done due to workload or other circumstances. Or let them develop/educate them self?s or better help others to develop/educate.

But then I'm an executive and don't care about employees or there households incomes, there children?s education or whether they have clothes to ware or eat a meal or.... or....

But then again maybe it is better to save 10 jobs then let go of all people on the job.
I don't no but made my choice rather quickly.

I entirely agree with azul. What kind of staff do you have? What kind of staff do you want? I have been on both sides of this dilemma. Many of us have. I used to be Web Administrator at a small ISP, and currently work as a Support Tech for a State University, with a couple of horrible tech jobs between (retail support tech jobs are thankless and degrading).

Put yourself in the worker's chair: What do I want from a tech job? I am creative and smart. I have put a ton of time and effort into developing my skills. What I want most is work that is challenging and important. I want to do good work that lets me use my brain. I don't mind working long hours, when long hours are needed. If there is important work that needs to be done, I will come in on weekends and stay late on weekdays. I excel at providing first class troubleshooting, support, and training. I suck at 'looking busy' when there is a slowdown.

I do good work, and do not deserve to be downsized simply because my supervisor is too shortsighted to find challenging work for me. When I was Admin at the ISP, and had techs under me who were playing Quake because there was no one on the phone, I had to find something useful for them to do. I gave them an outdated server, told them to configure it as a Linux workstation, and make it correctly dial into the ISP. This kept them involved for months, and gave them skills that were useful to the organization.

If there is no interesting and useful work for me to do, I deserve to be treated with respect by my supervisor. I deserve to be given tools to improve my skills and experience; an interesting piece of software or hardware to experiment with, maybe. How many boxes of cables do you expect me to wind and count before I find something less brain-numbing to fill my hours? I am an educated and experienced worker. I deserve better treatment than a tool that is put into storage simply because it is not being used for a time.

Lovely, instead of saving some jobs you would like to make all the employee's redundant. Nice way to go.

And yes of course it's better if management looks beyond the horizon of a few month forward before employing new co-workers.

But then again I'm repeating myself.

Rob

Maybe we are talking about really different situations, here? I have never been in a situation where there was too much IT staff. I have only been in situatuations where the experienced technical staff was overworked 75% of the time, and some short-sighted manager thought that reducing staff was the answer if someone failed to "look busy" during the occasional slow period. Then, when we were overwhelmed with work 2 months later, we had to train new hires instead of having staff who already knew the job. This also created an atmosphere of paranoia and distrust between managment and tech staff.

If your situation was different, and your IT staff had really been over-hired, then your solution to reduce ranks belongs in a different discussion. The original thread was asking what to to do with tech staff between projects, not what to do about bad hiring decisions.

...we haven't over-hired, but we do have slack time (or, alternatively, butt time, where you have to be at your phone, but there are things to be done between calls); more than I can justify allowing staff to be idle. This isn't about appearances. I care what my boss thinks, but I'm secure in my job, and I don't mind folks taking a well-deserved break after a stressful call, or clearing their mind after finishing a project task. But there is a line between a break and outright laziness. It's somewhat gray, but one knows when it's been crossed. If staff aren't willing to find constructive ways to fill that time, then I will assign tasks. That's really the heart of what I'm asking in the original post; suggestions for meaningful tasks I can assign. So far, this posting has produced many wonderful suggestions, just as I hoped it would.

Thanks to all.

I agree on you that the original discussion could be interpreted as if business is occasionally slow. And I haven't been in the situation of having too much staff. I'm very keen on that because of the implications it might have on people when getting, if necessary, made redundant.

As I could not make out whether in the starting discussion it is a structural or temporary issue, I started this thread with: if this is much of a problem....
Indicating it might be a structural problem. From there it gets another discussion with different solutions. On which I gave one possibility and going on with if it wasn't a structural but temporary issue.

So, yes, I do think that we don't differ on the issues whether they are structural or temporary.

But then again I?m open to ideas and solutions I didn?t think of.

could I work for you?

I totally agree with your statements.
It is much more costly to hire new emps and train them than to keep/"upgrade" the ones you already have!

Much better to increase their knowledge, making them more useful, than to lay off people, or just having them playing Freecell in their spare time.

Of course, I've seen many companies who fear knowledge. After all, if they learn more, perhaps they would be worth more, which could mean {*gasp*} a raise at review time! Worse yet, they could learn something at your company, then go to work some place else.

What a shame that companies no longer realize/think their biggest investments and most valuable assets are their employees.

hey thats bad i mean people just lying lazy doing stupid scrap my mind boils hot for them as i am an admin for a college and when the employees are lying lazy they create stupid prob for me grrrrrr well i feel is have a look as to how much employees are required i mean the rush for the job such that u can downsize them huh plus another thing is giving them some databse work like updating your databse would be much better ..... cant figure out whats better for them as lying sheeplesly is bad hahaha

Please, use punctuation, even if you have a disdain for capital letters.
This is not a 16-21 chat.
What ever happened to the people's writing manners?
Go ahead, post a snappy reply, just be sure to use punctuation this time around.

Yes, please use punctuation. After all you did say, and I quote, "as i am an admin for a college". One would think you would know how to spell and use punctuation correctly.

Does somebody have to say, the emperor has no clothes?

G, this guy must be from, let me guess, Philipines. I have not gotten much education from his posting. I suppose the guy is happy that he has job and he wants others out. Downsizing is not a solution, maybe he should go first and let someone take up his position.

What college? I very much appreciate your message and will save it

If that's the way you communicate at work, in whatever form, don't expect anyone to think of you as anything but a janitor with a CD wallet instead of the big ring of keys.

Funny! HAH, killing me!

Now I will take my lazy self back to work.

"This could be a simple matter of ineptitude on my part"

Sounds like it might be.

One simple thing that comes to mind is to log the most common help desk complaints then find a solution to keep it from recurring.

The other suggestions about training and/or getting your staffing right certainly make sense.

You don't mention what business segment your firm is in, but think about working with operations management to see how IT can steamline their work. Figure out what the best competing firms are doing and see if it can be adapted to your business. Do whatever you can to integrate the IT department into initiatives that can get your company an advantage over the competition. If it's going so well that you have the time, then you must think outside the confines of the "IT Dept" and about "XYZ Inc."

No doubt I am somewhat inept in this area, that's why I asked for help.

We are tech support for the legislative branch in state government, so we don't have to worry about competitors. We are customer service specialists, and have another group who works on and maintains servers. When not in session, we have one person assigned to each four-hour HD shift. During session, we have four per shift. Keeping busy during session is no problem, and we can't downsize during interim, because that's our project time but, admittedly, things do slow down for customer support during that period. We have the same problem many organizations do; because our skills are considered 'soft,' management doesn't believe training is needed, so money that would be spent for needed training goes elsewhere.

you are feeding the steroetype of government positions with talk like that...

"Promoted to the level of incompetence"

I didn't mean to imply that I am incompetent, only that, like anyone else, I have strengths and weaknesses. This kind of thing falls in the area where I tend to be weaker. Without bragging, I will say that I am very competent in most areas that matter. That said, I am HUMAN, after all; we all have our weak areas. Hopefully the advice I receive from this posting will help me improve this area of weakness. Thanks for your response.

is never afraid to ask for new idea.

The leader that takes ideas as an insult hurt everyone.

Keep looking for a better answer. New ones are popping up all the time.

teasing you with that comment, not saying you are incompetent.

in your case I would see if the rest of the IT department needs more people during the out of session times. That's when they can do the bigger tasks in the network and system areas with the least impact so they should actually be happy to get a couple of extra people.

Do certain staffers handle specific types of calls? Have them sit in on each other when they have spare time.

Is there a career path for help desk technicians? They could work on the skills necessary to move up the ladder, or for other IT positions in the company.

It sounds contracdictory, but everyone's job should be to try and put themselves out of a job.

So a help desk should be finding ways to reduce the need for a help desk.

A number of things come to mind off the top of my head.

Case analysis: go back through the cases and identify trends. Then come up with action plans to tackle the issues identified.

Projects: I personally think that there should be someone senior from the help desk involved in at least the implementation phase of every software project going on. They need to represent help desk's interest in how software is rolled out, and to bring back information about the project to the team.

Cross training; it really helps help desk staff to spend time working with the groups that they dispatch cases to. And I also used to do the reverse. Every year, each help desk staffer spent a week with another team, and every year every desktop technician, data centre tech etc., spent a week with the help desk. Amazing what it can do to promote better communications between the teams.

Automating tasks; resetting passwords, and walking clients through basic tasks is time consuming and ultimately not as high in "value add" as troubleshooting. So find ways to post frequently asked questions, look at some of the automated password reset tools, do lunch and learns - educate, and reduce the number of calls.

If you have staff sitting around waiting, I might suggest you rethink how you staff - you could move the bodies around so that you have more bodies during the peak hours, and have people doing other tasks when its quiet. The goal would be to provide great service at the busiest times.

If you accomplish all these things, you will find that you have staff with more of a sense of accomplishment, which in turn improves morale. And you would probably find a few of them move on to other roles within the company.

James

James

What are the staff's responsibilities?

We always have more work to do, but it's because we find work to do. We monitor EVERYTHING and see where we can make things more efficient, or something that's better for the firm.

We are our own research team, we train ourselves, and we experiment with lab boxes when testing new technologies.

What are your staff's ideas about what they should do?

Is there any documentation that is lacking?

Is there any preventive maintaince that can be done?

Is there an inventory of spare parts that can be checked and filled?

Are there any systems extra from employees leaving that could be reloaded so they are ready to go, or to replace a users system that breaks?

Give them books to brush up on tech.

Give them tutorial CD's to brush up on tech.

Do NOT go for "busy work". Only a poor manager judges an employee based on if they "look" busy or not.

If the call level is down, it sounds like they are doing their job GREAT and you should buy them a pizza on Friday. After all, KEEPING users working is the purpose, not to sit on the phone with a user. Give them all an Attaboy/Attagirl!

"If you can't think of anything to do, clean."

With a little bending of definitions, that can apply to any job.

Straighten up the cables in the server room or network closet.

Arrange all the HD calls into a nice database for easy searching.

Delete all the old emails you don't need anymore.

Ask a user what they think of X application or procedure.

Investigate system performance.

Defrag a disk.

Defrag an Exchange database.

Shrink an SQL database.

Review the backup schedules and procedures.

Test a restore from a backup.

Review disaster recovery plans.

Hold a meeting. (That'll kill an hour easily)

Build a system from scratch, break something, have a tech figure it out...

Have another tech figure out a different fix or workaround.

LOTS of things you could be doing.

Start with cleaning.

Isn't it amazing how we come back to mom? Your analogy is the perfect metaphor; and applicable to the situation. I'll take your list, add to it, and find the right direction. Very helpful! Thank you.

^ all of the above, plus research...
i have my staff constantly researching ways to make the network more secure, efficient, etc... if they have idle time they are not allowed to read non technical websites

and even when there is a project going on, i encourage they keep up w/ slashdot articles and ics.sans.org

You can only straighten up cables and clean so much. When I was in help desk I was given some of this busy work and it's ok the first couple of times but it gets old really fast. If you want to have your techs clean things, make it fun or make it few and far between

You can ALWAYS "clean" the knowledgebase, etc. That shouldn't be busy work, it should be part of the job, anyway...

The point is that there are TONS of things from which to chose, you shouldn't have to do the same twice (unless you like to) very often...

yes? Help Desk staff should never wait between calls (if they do, you may be way overstaffed); Call Center folk frequently sit and twiddle their thumbs no matter how many or few staff there are.

I would LOVE to have this problem. 3 of us including the Director to support all desktop software, hardware, network and pretty much everything with a power cord for 300 users in 4 locations. Our biggest problem is keeping morale in the positive and trying to prevent burnout. We are *never* once lacking in stuff to do... a little busy work would be a joy, oh well.

At your work, are job roles so finely hair-split that some staff people can't "do" hardware or network responsibilities as part of the Help Desk team and if that's the case, how about reviewing the wisdom of that approach? Hmmm.

So what can a manager assign them to do when the workload inevitably slows? Um...

1. Update the physical PC and printer inventory. Make sure there are labels on all that supported hardware you're responsible for and ensure data is updated in whatever software is used to do so. 2. Assign staff to go through and update knowledge base documentation. 3. Develop a training system for new staff and practice on each other. 4. Identify inconsistent desktop images and start replacing equipment. 4. Plan the next hardware or software rollout: who does what and when? 5. Come up with a project list (tasks unrelated to routine Help Desk duties) and start attacking it. 5. Cross train, cross train, cross train -- unless every staff person can do it all for every type of incoming call. 6. Place follow up calls for every request for the past 3 months and the prior 3 months before then. 7. Make a new (or improve an existing) Customer Service Satisfaction survey to track the level of satisfaction in service given for your internal/external clients as a group project; solicit input, assign project leads, try the new product and start working on it. 8. Find the top ten (or 20, or 100) hit list for Help Desk requests and assign instructions to be written for a Self Help area on the Intranet. 9. When those are identified, you have also found the 20% of staff responsible for creating 80% of all incoming Help Desk requests... so start work on training those people where it is most needed!
10. As a group eview SLAs and start process improvement.

Best of luck to ya,

Julie

I want to thank everyone who has responded to this query.

To answer a few questions;
1. We are a composite of a Help Desk and a Call Center.
2. Yes, territorialism is a factor. No, I am not in a position to change that--yet. So it is difficult to promote cross-training.
3. We're not given a training budget; any training we request has to have an ironclad case built to convince management to buy off on it.