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For years, IT pros and managers have searched for an IT staff to user ratio that allows for peak tech performance and adequate incident response times without overworking valuable IT staff. Having those guidelines would go a long way to help justify headcount and convince the boss that overworked IT professionals need additional help, but finding a single magical formula hasn’t been simple.

In the Spiceworks Community, discussions about the ideal IT staff ratio have unfortunately failed to come to a conclusion because many variables affect workload including industry, number of devices managed, IT responsibility areas, types of IT pros employed, and more.

The consensus among most IT pros that how much IT staff you need for a given number of users or devices "just depends" on your organization isn’t terribly useful if you're trying to make a case to hire. Not satisfied with this answer, Spiceworks recently asked more than 600 IT professionals about their IT staffing practices to better answer the question, “how many IT pros do I need to support my environment and users?"



Key takeaways

After listening to the Community and crunching the numbers, we identified several key indicators that can help you make more informed IT staffing decisions or build a case to hire more help. We also identified several other factors and responsibility areas that result in increased IT workload. Here’s what we discovered:

It’s all about the hours

The most important IT staffing metric we found was the average amount of time IT pros work per week. One of the key complaints about jobs in IT is long hours, which can understandably lead to burnout.

According to our survey, IT full-timers work far longer than the standard 40 hour American work week. In fact, our respondents said they work around 52 hours per week on average. That's 12 hours above and beyond what most people work, and over the course of a year that adds up to several weeks of full 24-hour days.

Interestingly, IT work isn’t quite as busy for part-time IT staff, as our part-time respondents said they put in about 21 hours per week.

On the whole, the majority of full-time IT pros (approximately 54% of them) work more than a 40-hour work week. In fact, 18% of our respondents said that they work more than 60 hours per week and 35% of IT pros we talked to said that they work at least 50 hours per week.

The long hours that many in IT experience aren’t typically conducive to employee happiness (especially if there’s not equivalent compensation), and crazy hours are a definite red flag that IT could use a little help and a good way to quantitatively show management that something needs to change.

User issues create a lot of work

So what’s keeping IT staff at work and how can management ease the pain? Anyone in IT can tell you that a big job related headache is fighting fires caused by end user issues, and now we have the data to prove it.

Our survey shows that IT departments with more dedicated help desk technicians work fewer hours on average, and that departments with fewer help desk staff tend to work more than 40 hours per week. This is evidence that help desk tasks take up a large chunk of IT man hours and that adding support personnel can help free up time for all IT staff regardless of role, which in the long run allows everyone at a businesses to get more done.﻿

Larger IT departments share the workload more effectively Similarly, organizations where full-time IT pros work 40 hours or less per week tend to have larger IT departments. IT pros that work in smaller IT departments, particularly in ones with fewer help desk technicians and systems administrators, tend to work more than 40 hours per week. The average overworked IT department has 10 staff members while IT departments that work normal hours have an average of 17 IT pros on staff.﻿









Industry plays a big role in IT workload According to survey data, it really is true what people say about cushy government jobs. IT pros who work in education, government and healthcare work fewer total hours per week than those in other industries. In education and government for example, only 37% and 33% of IT staff exceed a typical 40-hour work week respectively. That's in stark contrast to other industries like engineering, manufacturing, and non-profits where long hours for full-time employees over 50 hours per week are the norm.

Expectations of IT affect workload significantly Across the board, it’s a given that most IT departments support PCs, servers, and printers. But when they take on extra responsibilities, employees in IT have to work harder. We dove deep into our survey data to identify which less common IT duties result in a lot of extra hours. We found that when IT department responsibilities extend to cover wireless access points, phone systems, data center lab environments, or data integration projects, IT pros tend to work more than 40 hours each week.

If your IT department is going above and beyond by tackling tasks that other departments aren’t and you're working exceptionally long hours, this is a great point to make with the boss! IT pros in North America work longer than the rest of the world In our survey, 57% of North American IT pros reported working more than the standard 40-hour week, but that doesn’t mean their EMEA counterparts are slouches. Survey respondents from the rest of the world average 48.7 hours of work per week with 49% of them working more than 40 hours per week. While there's a slight difference, this data shows that no matter where you are, you’re probably working pretty hard if you're a full-time IT employee. What does it all mean? These facts are all interesting on their own, but what big picture do they paint? The most obvious takeaway is that IT pros are a hard working and often overworked bunch! About our original question regarding the ideal IT staff to user/device ratio, we can't provide a single magical formula, but now you should have a better understanding of what other IT departments are doing and of what indicators point to the need for more IT headcount. The primary indicator we found is the average number of hours everyone is (over)working. All of that overtime adds up to increased stress, decreased job satisfaction, and general unhappiness that could lead to more turnover and risk in your organization. And because properly functioning technology is now vital to every company in the world, it makes financial sense to invest in people that make sure the computer infrastructure that businesses rely on “just works.” IT enables everyone else to do their best work. In a world that’s increasingly dependent on the Internet, digital devices, and online communications, now might be the right time to put more money towards IT personnel. In addition to keeping the lights on, IT departments can also help identify and implement new tech solutions that can help companies become more efficient and save money in the long run... but they can't do this important forward-looking work if they are constantly fighting fires. We hope that the facts and figures we’ve shared can help you make the case for investments in IT that will translate real into dollars and sense that management can take to the bank! Learn more about the business of IT Want to learn more? Soft skills and the ability to make a persuasive argument go a long way in both justifying budget and advancing your own IT career. Watch this video on how to convince the boss by learning how to speak the language of ROI (return on investment), which could help you get the extra help at work you need and put more money in your pocket. How does your organization stack up against our survey results? Let us know in the comments.