As cost centers (not revenue centers), IT departments often struggle to demonstrate the value they provide. In startups or very small companies, IT “value” is often not even on the radar. It’s just, let’s get an internet connection and some laptops and email addresses.
Even as you grow, it’s usually taken for granted that IT will provide your company with functioning technology. And yes, of course there’s value in having working laptops, networks, business systems, and security. But even when IT starts tracking metrics like help desk response time, security incidents, or system uptime, it’s tricky to assign dollar values to speedy help desk resolutions, or to outages or security incidents that never happen because IT prevented them.
There are other ways of looking at “IT value”. For most organizations, I think the better metrics are the ones that focus on business outcomes. The most obvious example here is when IT projects support company goals; these types of outcomes are pretty easy to quantify. For example, your ERP project was completed on time, allowing finance to manage multiple business entities, which supported the company’s goal of international expansion.
But another important business outcome that’s commonly overlooked is employee engagement.
“An employee’s ability to get work done every day is tied to technology—but these tools also shape how an employee feels about where they work.” (Citrix EX study, 2024)
Why is employee engagement important? The Covid pandemic was kind enough to give us a crash course on this! It ushered in a bold new universe of work-from-home and hybrid work models. These models have provided a ton of benefits, including better work/life balance and reduced office rent costs. But one not-so-great side effect has been higher turnover. Employees who rarely or never come into an office have a weaker connection to the organization and are less “sticky” – more likely to move on to new pastures that seem greener. How do you improve employees’ “stickiness”? Well, ask your HR team, because they’ve been busy trying to find new, creative ways to drive employee engagement since 2020!
It sounds simple, but improving employee engagement will benefit your business in all sorts of ways, and may be more valuable than you think. Let’s go to the studies…
- Employee Engagement: Pay, perks, and bonuses all had an impact but were not as important as individuals’ sense of making progress in their work (Harvard Business School, 2011)
- Improved Retention: Employees are 230% more engaged and 85% more likely to stay beyond three years if they feel they have technology that supports them (Qualtrics, 2021).
- Reduced Turnover: An increase in turnover from 12% to 22% reduces productivity by 40 percent and financial performance by 26 percent (Journal of Applied Psychology, 2013). With engaged employees, organizations experience 59% less turnover (Gallup, 2020)
- Improved Customer Satisfaction: study showed that engaged employees generate 81 percent higher customer satisfaction scores. (Journal of Applied Psychology, 2013)
- Increased Discretionary effort – This refers to effort expended by employees outside their job function. 95 percent of employees reporting a positive experience with their company say they expend discretionary effort. The number drops significantly for employees reporting a poor employee experience (IBM, 2018)
- Flow State – Executives reported being five times more productive while in flow. If you could increase the amount of time in flow by 20 percent, workplace productivity could double. (McKinsey, 2013)
Your IT team definitely can, and should, contribute here. IT is one of the few departments (along with HR) that interacts with every employee. IT is in a strong position to promote a company’s sense of community with a welcoming onboarding process, good customer service, and strong ongoing communications.
IT is also in a position to develop cross-functional partnerships to identify processes that are too “painful” and manual, and to implement improvements, automations, and tools that make these processes more efficient. For example, employees on the Sales team gain back 5 hours per week – time formerly spent on some tedious task – which can now be spent on higher-level customer interactions.
When you realize IT’s potential for improving employee productivity and job satisfaction, this can contribute to better employee retention, and by extension, lower recruiting and training costs, improved team stability, knowledge retention, and a better customer experience for your clients.
So if the IT department can show it’s doing all THIS for your company, well, now we’re getting somewhere, right? Viewing IT’s value through the lens of business outcomes, it helps us better define what we mean by “functioning technology ecosystem”. An IT team that’s really good at maximizing employee productivity is going to be seen as a lot more valuable than a team that’s really good at putting out fires.
And this is the part where I say, this is where I can help 🙂 I can help your organization evaluate the technological component of the overall employee experience, and develop a roadmap for improvement.
It’s all about:
- Understanding your organization’s operational pain points
- Staying on top of user sentiment
- Prioritizing projects that address high-impact needs and user feedback
- Quantifying the benefits
- Communicating (“Here’s what we’re working on and why”)
It’s not always easy, but if this is your focus, you’ll probably not need to struggle so much to demonstrate IT’s value to your organization.
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