Motivation At Workplace For Support Team

leokrish
My query is about creating healthy and motivating team environment. Scenarios is as below:
Its a support team in IT company; work is related to support business applications and monitoring the IT systems.
50% of team is long tenured and rest are recent hires of 1+year.
Work is in shifts supporting round the clock
Challenges
-They feel its a monotonous work; no learning curve.
-People are willing to work on something new - however its customer driven and nothing new can be offered in near future.
-They want to increase knowledge and skillsets, however no action to achieve it
-Due to lack of budgets, incentives / bonus are stopped from a year
-No willingness to work in night shifts - although there is shift allowances
Ask:
What steps can be taken up in a support environment to motivate people
Dinesh Divekar
Dear Leokrish,
Though I am not from IT industry, let me give 1-2 suggestions.
Firstly, let me suggest you the job rotation. Is it possible to move seniors from support function to developer function? Of course this will involve the training of the employee, nevertheless, you may obtain bond from the employee that he/she will not leave the job for the next 1-2 years. To do this, never take seniors directly in the support function. Always take juniors and whenever opportunity arises, move them to developer side.
Secondly, what about those who are on the bench? Can they be deployed to work for 3 months in the support function? This will enhance utilisation of manpower who are on the bench? However, again do not tell them to work more than three months as no developer would like to work in support function.
Thanks,
Dinesh Divekar
leokrish
Hello Dinesh,
Thank you for your response.
I agree that giving the tenured staff a next level opportunity would be benificial from employee engagement perspective, as well will help to get fresh blood in the support team. This concept is in process and may get implemented in near future.
Regarding bench, we do not follow this approach in our organization.
Dinesh Divekar
Dear Leokrish,
I have one more suggestion. How about outsourcing the work? This will reduce your burden of take care of motivation of the team that does monotonous work. If you outsource this process, slightly the cost may go up but then you will be able to concentrate on high-end activity rather than managing these routine issues. You can include in the SLA parameters under which the outsourcing agency's work will be assessed.
Alternatively, you may approach some staffing company. If you hire them then managing the continuity of the work will be their responsibility.
Thanks,
Dinesh Divekar
leokrish
Indeed a very good way to tackle such situation, as in case of outsourcing they have pool of resources to manage the work and also can give opportunity to tenured folks by providing other customer or domain opportunities.
In my case, it is out of scope. Also due to compliance reasons, and management decescions it will not be possible.
Actually, we are part of a offshore team!
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