How MSPs Must Adapt To WFH

The pandemic has changed work forever. I have long maintained that people being present in the office is an ineffective way to “measure” productivity. Managers who traditionally insisted that they see their staff at their desk to know that they are working really struggled with the transition to a work from home (WFH) model. The truth is that their dependence on seeing their staff was a false metric, to begin with. 

The IT industry was temporarily sheltered from the great resignation, or the term I prefer, the great reshuffling. That reprieve seems to be expiring now. Many IT organizations are starting to see workers leaving. The labor market is extremely tight. Statistics showed that unemployment was at an all-time low pre-pandemic at 4%. The unemployment rate for technology roles was -6%.

I haven’t seen updated stats, but we can safely assume that this trend has worsened. Regardless of how you may feel about the WFH trend, it’s dangerous to ignore it. It’s clear that the ability to work from home is a crucial perk that most staff demand. Not offering this flexibility amplifies the risk of losing staff. 

You can’t be too rigid in your stance on in-office or remote work.

Staff won’t always leave for more money, but if someone offers more money and staff feel their current employer isn’t providing the flexibility they prefer. That decision becomes much easier to make as evidenced by this small study. A poll of 1000 workers in the US suggests that 40% of them would choose to quit their job rather than return to the office full time.

Talk To Staff

Here are some tips for your company to better understand what your staff desire in their work structure and flexibility.

Collect staff feedback

As you determine your company's return to office policies you should collect feedback from your staff. Know how they feel and what their preferences are. This doesn't mean you have to fully support the direction that they prefer, but you're better to know how far you'll need to lean in one direction or the other. 

Be Patient

Be patient with staff as they reacclimate to being in the office, commuting, and finding their home life balance again. Go slow and increase office time based on the requirements of the business and be clear with people about why you feel physically being in the office is important for that work.

See The Whole Person

It’s important to recognize that people have a life outside of work. When people work for a company that respects their individual needs it can be a powerful retention tool. Provided you’ve built the trust and professional accountability with staff, you should look for opportunities to accommodate their lives where practical. Does someone need to leave early on Thursdays to pick up their kids? No worries. Someone is always late and would do better on a later shift? Sure you can figure that out. 

Build your bench

I've spoken to several owners/managers that have seen people quit already. Others have been poached by companies in the industry that are now hiring people regardless of geographic restrictions. 

It's about to get even tougher to compete for talent in the industry and everyone needs to prepare for the escalating talent war.

Outsource What You Can

The WFH experience has also accelerated the options to outsource some of the work we do as MSPs.

I find it interesting that so many MSPs are resistant to outsourcing their helpdesk functions to a third party. For all the same reasons it makes sense for your customers to outsource to you as an MSP, and it makes sense for you to outsource to a 3rd party helpdesk. Yet the majority of owners I suggest this option to are resistant to the idea of outsourcing. Some have had failed experiences with this in the past. Others apply their own experience in dealing with offshore support teams in many of our vendors.

 It’s true there are some risks to outsourcing your helpdesk. After all, it’s the primary point of interaction with your company and the users you support. So it’s perfectly reasonable to be protective of this interaction and ensure clients are getting high-quality support.

Here are some key points to review to ensure you can effectively outsource some of your work to a 3rd party helpdesk.

Documentation

It’s crucial that you have good systems and process documentation in place. Without this, your 3rd party helpdesk will simply be a very expensive call answering service that will escalate everything up to you.

They still require management

Regardless of whether you outsource to a master MSP (formal MSP helpdesk teams like GMS, Uptime, or Continuum) or hire contractors, they still require management. 

You can just pay someone else to do the work and assume it will be done well without input or feedback. You have to proactively spend time coaching the helpdesk team on process improvement, client experience coaching, and ticket handling. Outsourcing this work removes a lot of the burden around hiring and some HR responsibilities, but does not excuse you some actively managing this extension of your team to ensure your standards of client service are being met.

You still need to be local

There is still a considerable amount of work that needs to be done onsite or in the office. There still is a benefit of having a local presence. In particular in the roles of account management and business development. Also, many MSPs still need someone to receive equipment, build workstations and install equipment at the client site. Some parts of the local work can be offloaded to 3rd party contractors, but the majority of MSPs insource this work.

“People buy from people.”

"People buy from people is a true adage. Once you have a stable and predictable service delivery department, focusing on account management should be a strong focus for your organization. This is a part of the business that is much more difficult to outsource and in many cases do remotely. 

Complexity of work influences work location

There is a great graphic representing some work by Amy Edmonson. The graphic represents how you should think about where work gets done relative to the complexity of the work.

Routine work that has an established process can generally be done from anywhere. For example, does your support desk staff need to be sitting in your office to triage and close service tickets? No. This work can be done from anywhere assuming you have the technology in place to enable this.

Complex work that requires more people and/or the work has no established process, in many cases might work better if you have people working together in person. For example, strategic planning with a group of 10 people benefits a lot from an in-person session. It can be done remotely, but the physical aspect is beneficial.

There isn’t a hard and fast rule on what work needs to be done in person, but this axis gives a great framework for groups to think about when in person is truly required.

One area that is particularly relevant for MSPs is workstation and laptop deployment. This is a tricky bit of work to do without having people in the office to receive, build, and ship equipment. That said it can be done better than how people are generally managing this process. Something more MSPs should look into is having their distributor pre-seed their workstations and laptops with a base image. This image should be able to set itself up and attach to your RMM. Then the RMM can run scripts to complete the build of the asset. This is an advanced bit of automation, but it’s completely doable. The more advanced version of this would be to leverage intune and autopilot to do a very modern build of that workstation/laptop.

For most though, having some clear expectations of someone being in the office for some of these activities is still required.

Pay appropriately

I didn’t say more, just appropriately. People generally won’t leave their job just for money. Money is a slice of the value pie and the size of that slice in the pie is variable based on the person. If the person likes the team they have and are satisfied with their position, it’s unlikely they would leave if someone offered slightly more money.

Granted if someone offered them 20-50% more than they currently make it’d be tough to say no. 

Review pay bands

Now is a good time to review your pay bands for roles. Ensure that everyone in the same pay band is compensated with a similar salary. We often assume that staff don’t talk to each other about salary, but generally, this is not a safe assumption. If people on the team are performing well in their role, but haven’t had a salary adjustment for a couple of years, it’s a good time to correct those shortfalls.

Cost of living adjustments

Inflation is surging and life is suddenly more expensive. You may want to consider a broader review of salaries. Compare your staff salaries to industry averages. If you’re paying under the 25% percentile on roles you’ll want to correct this otherwise you’re likely to have people seeing those 20-50% offers pull them away.

If you haven’t been doing cost of living adjustments (COLA) for your staff in the past, now is an important time to consider this. It’s one thing when the cost of living is increasing by 2-3% annually. It’s a completely different story when the cost of living skyrockets by 10-15% over a 6-month period.

Managing performance in a hybrid work world

The good news is that managing in a WFH world isn’t that much different than managing in-office staff. We’ve already established that measuring based on inputs, like hours at your desk is not a useful metric to track engagement or productivity. 

The key to managing staff is straightforward. However, don’t mistake simple for easy. ;)

Communicate Expectations

The critical first step in performance management is communicating expectations. This step is often overlooked by managers.There iss a broad assumption made by managers that staff understands what is expected of them. Yet when you ask staff that doesn’t end up being true. Don’t leave this to chance, make sure you have clear conversations and document “what good looks like,” for every role. This can be done through role scorecards.

Measure objectively on things they can control

Now that you have the KPIs for staff positions you can measure those KPIs and discuss them each week with staff. The fact that the KPIs are objective and in their control is important. Telling a team member that they are “underperforming” is subjective. They may mistake their effort for results. If they feel like they are working really hard and you’re unhappy with their work that is a toxic mix. If you point out that you both agreed that they should be responsible for closing 40 tickets each week and they only closed 15, that is a pretty obvious problem. They are in control of how tickets they can close in a week. In the early stages, you may need to do some roadblock removal for them to remove issues that actually prevent them from meeting those targets, but over time it should become obvious if your expectations need to be adjusted or if the team member just isn’t applying themselves.

Conclusion

WFH is the new normal. It’s a work benefit that a majority of staff enjoy. It has a host of benefits for most organizations. It removes geographic hiring barriers, reduces office space costs, and it pushes clients into a new paradigm of digital adoption. These benefits come with risks as well. Competition for talent has truly become a global game, maintaining a company culture in a distributed environment is tough, and the work required to reform client technology adoption is a huge amount of work. 

MSPs that embrace these changes will see increased retention and a full projects funnel. MSPs that resist this trend and try to hold on to the old ways of doing things will see higher attrition in talent and clients. The old models of how we did things in the office don’t apply in this new paradigm. We work in the technology industry which has a six-month shelf life. Everything changes, that’s just the nature of the industry. The cycles of change don’t present themselves as much in our management models, but right now is different. The world is changing and you have to choose to change with it or get left behind.