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Summer will be here in just a few short weeks. And with summer comes wanderlust—strong desires for sunlit beaches, snow-capped mountain views, and tropical paradises. On top of that, your employees have family reunions to attend, holiday cookouts to throw, and they need time to recover from the dark months of winter. And that means PTO backfill.
More specifically, according to a study published in the Lancet medical journal, a healthy work-life balance isn’t just important for your employees’ mental health; it’s also critical for their vascular health as well. Due to the sedentary lifestyle and compounded stress levels, individuals who work excessively long hours (55+ hours per week) have a 33% greater risk of stroke and a 13% greater risk of heart disease.
But simply offering vacation time to your employees is (often) not enough. Especially in high-level IT management scenarios, you might need to strongly encourage your engineers and technicians to take advantage of that accrued PTO. In fact, Forbes reports that American workers forfeited roughly 40% of their paid vacation in 2017 alone. Their reasoning? The fear of falling behind.
Here’s how to assuage those fears.
Generalization: The Bane of Vacation
In complex IT environments, you might only have one or two engineers covering multiple lines of your hardware. Gone are the days of specialization and dedicated experts for each server line and application; generalization is here to stay. But that means that your data center engineers, server admins, and help desk technicians wear numerous hats on any given day—taking vacation to alleviate the stress from work could cause them more anxiety than it does to just stay and keep working. They know that if they leave for Cancun for a week, they leave behind skills gaps and experience voids.
No one wants to fall behind or be “that guy” who leaves co-workers in a difficult situation.
The reality is that, even when everyone is at their desk or workstation, your IT team is already spread thin. Extended team member absences and overlapping vacation schedules have the potential to severely affect your company’s productivity and efficiency.
Quite obviously, it’s not financially prudent for you to hire a redundant set of full-time engineers and technicians to simply be on-call for vacation, sick leave, and unexpected absences. You need a more scalable solution; one that encourages your employees to take the time that they need while still maintaining your operational momentum in-house. You need on-demand engineering expertise to cover these workload voids.
Enable R&R with PTO Backfill
The experts at CentricsIT architected an on-demand PTO backfill service through our CentricsIT SmartHands program.
Our international network of strategic partners enables us to leverage the knowledge and expertise of a worldwide pool of highly-vetted, licensed IT engineers and technicians. As a result of these partnerships, CentricsIT can deploy L1 and L2 support-level engineers directly to our clients’ data center doorsteps, no matter where they operate or how many locations they sustain.
Most importantly, with SmartHands billing, you only pay for what you need, when you need it. Whether it be a few hours, a day, or several weeks at a time, our contracts flex with your requirements in real-time. However, our economical pricing doesn’t mean that we skimp on customization.
Quick Trips
For short-term employee absences—and depending on the severity of the situation—CentricsIT will level-match your company’s support needs and will either deploy an individual or an entire team to your facility in a matter of hours. These highly-experienced technicians will be ready and fully-capable of becoming an extension of your existing IT team; you just tell them what you need in the interim.
Extended Stay
If you know in advance that one of your IT staff members will be taking a long-term vacation, notify CentricsIT immediately. We will assign a level-match SmartHands technician to come to your facility and train closely alongside of your employee(s) for days and even weeks (if necessary) in advance.
We know full well that our employees will be stepping into a multi-faceted position, so each SmartHands engineer focuses on learning not just about the position that they are filling, but also about your company’s unique processes and protocols as a whole. Because in-house communication and collaboration is crucial to continued efficiency and productivity, our SmartHands technicians will also focus on learning and integrating with your company’s employee culture. Through this level of dedication, we guarantee a seamless staff member transition both into and out of your workforce.
Vacation Can Be Restful for Both Parties
Encourage your employees to use their PTO with confidence.
SmartHands relieves team-related pressure while your employees are away, and it grants the peace of mind that, upon their return, they will not be woefully behind. You have ready-access to a powerful, scalable IT team through CentricsIT, so, for the health and productivity of your current workforce, do what you can to enable the rest that they need.
Need a more economical solution for PTO backfill? Contact a Solutions Architect at CentricsIT to get on-demand engineering talent for the summer and beyond.
