Calculate the Value
We’re hearing a lot about how large enterprises are scrambling to retain talent. While there are competing theories about the causes of today’s tight labor market, there’s no doubt that mounting employee attrition is increasing the pressure on IT administrators. They’re seeing many more service requests to onboard and offboard employees, and that underscores the need for the next phase of digital transformation in enterprise communications.
What follows is a fresh look at the business case for automating provisioning and more aspects of communication management for unified communications (UC) and contact centers—plus a new way to calculate the savings of time and money that enterprises can gain by transforming the way they onboard new employees.
A Greater Volume of Service Requests is a Greater Challenge
Earlier this year, we wrote about higher rates of turnover in the contact center, noting “when there’s high attrition, there’s also more work managing the life cycle of those employees.” Now it’s clear that turnover is happening at all levels of the enterprise. So, there’s more work for telecommunications teams exactly when some are struggling with fewer staff members. Managers are also dealing with this year’s increased labor costs and last year’s budgets as they ensure continuity of service for the enterprise. It’s daily challenge, and no one thinks the challenge will simply fade away.
High Rates of Employee Turnover Are Expected to Continue
There’s new research to suggest that turnover will increase through 2022. According to Gartner, the COVID-19 pandemic caused many to reevaluate their home-work balance, with 52% of employees reporting that remote work policies affect their decision to stay or leave. Yet, while some say there’s a large and sudden increase in turnover, Harvard Business Review suggests there’s nothing new about these increasing rates. Their analysis shows that monthly employee attrition has been increasing by 0.10 percent every year since 2009, slowing in 2020 only due to the uncertainty of the pandemic. After the first waves of COVID-19 waned, employee attrition picked up again.
Retirement is One Factor in the Great Resignation
One key insight from the Harvard Business Review analysis is that a significant source of turnover in 2021 was due to retirement, with workers aged fifty-five and older declining 1.9%. Enterprise communications often relies on the expertise of senior talent, so waves of retirements represent a a significant “brain drain” on the industry.
Automating Communication Management is More Important Than Ever
Regardless of the reasons, higher employee attrition seems like it’s here to stay for a while. That means there’s going to be more demand for provisioning new employees, but fewer staff members to do the time-consuming manual work of configuring communication resources one employee at a time.
There’s also likely to be fewer senior staff members to manage, monitor and audit today’s complex communications systems. That makes it more important than ever for large enterprises to future-proof their operation by automating routine move, add, change, and delete workflows (MACDs) such as onboarding and offboarding employees.
Calculate the Savings for Your Operation
Automation significantly reduces the time to complete routine tasks, increases the consistency of configurations, and automatically produces a detailed log of all transactions, making monitoring and auditing faster and easier, too. Also important to remember is that timely deprovisioning terminated employees is equally important as onboarding new ones. It improves security and helps to administrators maintain a more accurate inventory of user licenses and hardware. For the most accurate inventories, automated resource monitoring provides many benefits, including an effortless way to track the licenses and other inventory that can be repurposed when employees leave.
To see how much your enterprise could save in one year, just by automating provisioning workflows, see the Starfish Automation Value Calculator. It can get you started on building the business case for automating communication management in your environment, reduce the impact of increasing employee attrition, and enhance the speed and efficiency of your operation.