Many IT pros struggle with motivation at work

When it comes to IT jobs, there’s a huge gap between answering help-desk tickets and helping drive the AI revolution. That gap could be the root cause of a lack of motivation among IT pros.

Compared to their peers in other industries, IT professionals are among the least motivated, according to a poll by consultancy Full Potential Group in partnership with Motivational Maps.

In a recent IT Brew poll, 29% of 541 respondents said their motivation only came in “occasional waves,” while 23% said they were consistently bored. Just 21% reported being motivated “all the time.”

Demotivator. What’s behind this lack of motivation? Automation—or lack thereof—could be a significant factor, Phil Christianson, the chief product officer at Xurrent, told IT Brew. If organizations helped IT help desk workers automate more tasks, for instance, it could reduce monotony.

“It’s about empowerment, it’s about making sure that…if you have the mundane tasks, you have tooling in place at your company that can at least help the people responsible for it feel like they have a path to something bigger,” Christianson said. “I also like to marry…as a manager, mundane work with automation tools. Suddenly you’ll see the world start to flip, where you give people something more interesting and exciting and longer term to work on.

Christianson also pointed to the mundane as potentially driving a lack of motivation among IT professionals. For example, they often face the same requests over and over again, such as unlocking a machine after too many password attempts.

“That is probably not going to get anyone out of bed and excited to do their job in the morning to unlock [someone’s] computer, which he typed the password in nine times wrong for,” Christianson said. “But it’s an important thing to do, and it keeps the company running.”

Vic Chynoweth, the CEO of Tempo Software, said that AI could also impact IT pros’ morale, especially if they feel like the technology puts their career longevity at risk.

“This isn’t the first time technology has disrupted ways of working that were already preestablished or known and just became the norm,” Chynoweth said. “[It’s] happened multiple...times over history. This is just the latest, and it’s probably the first, though, that impacts knowledge workers more so than anything else in the past.”

What to do. If the mundane is bringing the vibes down, Christianson recommends that IT pros look for new ways to automate tasks and free up time.

“Maybe your company already has software licenses with companies, and you go browse their website and recognize there’s other tools in their toolkit that aren’t being used,” Christianson said. “Go do some research, figure out what’s out there, what tools are available, and then back that up with some knowledge.”