Someone Should be Asking for More Work
So you finally got that IT project done and after all the hassles and bugs, things seem to be working smoothly. Your anxiety levels are returning back to normal and your managers seem to have the new processes under control. But what about your other employees? What are they doing now? Since the IT project helped automate things, how are your employees using their extra time? You probably answered in your mind, “I don’t know” or “I think they’re doing ____.”
I’ll bet your data entry employees haven’t come in to your office, or their managers’, and asked what they need to do next. Now they’re less efficient because they’re doing less work in the same amount of time as they had before. But, if you do have an employee who came to ask for more work, give them a bonus. They’re probably worth keeping around.
If your IT project reduced duplicate or routine work like data entry, but your employees are still on the payroll for the same amount of money even though they’re not doing that routine work anymore, then it might be time to re-evaluate the status of some of your employees. Here’s a delicate way to examine the effect of your recent IT project on your employees, their responsibilities, and what they might have time to do now.
IT and Employee Evaluation
An IT Project Evaluation Survey is a tactful way you can evaluate the decrease in work load on employees because of a recent IT project. This evaluation survey is constructed, and should be presented to your employees, as an opportunity to evaluate the IT project. It is very important your employees should not feel threatened or that they are the ones being evaluated. The short survey questions transition from evaluating the IT project and how the IT project HELPED your employees, to how much work it reduced for them in their daily responsibilities, and then back again to evaluating the IT project and allowing them to give their input about future IT projects. Communicating that the survey is being used to evaluate the IT project - not the employee - is key to getting honest data. This survey will help you first estimate how much free time employees now have because of automation; second, get an idea of how well the project is fulfilling it’s purpose; and third, what IT project could be tackled next to further reduce “busy work”.
Your Evaluation
Before distributing the IT Project Survey to your employees, take the opportunity to complete a copy of the survey yourself. The IT and employee managers should also take the survey. Doing so will give yourself and your managers an opportunity to indicate their expectations and experiences with your technology project and compare them to your employee’s experiences.
Download Survey
You can download the evaluation in a PDF to print. If you want to modify the questions you can download both a PDF and the excel file by downloading the zip file.
Using the Data
First, realize that survey data is a collection of opinions. Be sure to weigh the employees’ opinions against those of their managers, IT staff, and your own observations. I’d recommend tabulating your results digitally for future reference and tracking your IT projects over time. Additionally, the data will only be valuable if used to direct the efforts of the affected employees.
Discussion/Feedback
Did your managers agree with using an IT evaluation to determine what to do with the extra bandwidth, or did the managers already think their employees were busy enough? How many hours did your IT project free up per employee per week and what do you plan to do with that extra time? Are you going to reallocate employee resources or downsize your payroll?
