Recently, I was speaking with some IT buddies (are there any other kind?) who have a legitimate gripe: They are exempt employees who log countless "overtime" hours with little or no compensation.
In many small and mid-sized organizations, in which IT staffers wear many hats and in which the IT staff is a skeleton crew, it is the rule rather the exception that these folks are "on the system" late at night, on weekends, on holidays, on sick days, and during vacation. In larger organizations, it is also likely that some IT staffers are engaged in the same behavior, especially during a system implementation, an upgrade, or some other high-profile project.
Granted, good managers recognize the valor of these staffers and do reward them with comp days, decent raises, and/or bonuses. And others do not "charge" their staffers with sick or vacation days if the poor wretch is spending hours debugging a program, rebuilding a corrupt database, or repairing damage to a system or program, the genesis of which can be traced to his or her non-IT brethren ("Uh, oops. I didn't know that if I did this, that would happen."), while simultaneously retching into a basin.
However, even the good managers must sometime or all the time sidestep company policy or resort to fisticuffs with human resources (the bastion of company policy) in order to compensate their staffers. HR will continue to "charge" the employee with a sick or vacation day, even if said employee spent a large part of said day solving the myriad computer problems of the company. So why is HR so obdurate? And why the twisted policies?
In my humble opinion, the problem is that, usually, when employees in non-IT departments are sick, on vacation, or on holiday, they rarely do any real work. That is, they may check email or ensure that a deal closes (because they then get a big fat commission check), but it is the unsung IT hero who dutifully logs on and fixes the mundane problems that incidentally keep the friggin' company up and running and earning revenue so it can pay those other employees their big fat commissions. I do want to underscore the difference between the self-important exec who should either have his/her cell phone implanted (they are already Borg-like anyway; what's another piece of hardware?) or get a room with it versus the legitimate staffer who is responding to an ODBC failure.
Actually, I do recall an old yarn that goes like this: "Once upon a time, employees who were out ill or on vacation actually rested in bed and had fun, respectively. These employees used sick days and vacation days for these respective activities." The fact is, in our new and improved "always switched on and connected" world, the boundaries have blurred considerably between the office and the home. The last vestiges of this practice of separating work life from other life struggle to survive in other industrialized nations, although they too are going the way of the dodo.
Human resources is also becoming vestigial. Let's face it, with employee-self-service on the company intranet, the humans in HR could be easily replaced with voice recognition and response systems that spout the only two sentences that are ever uttered ad nauseam like a bad caricature of a defective Stepford wife: "Are we charging him/her with a sick day or vacation day?" and "If he/she is out of the office, then we must use a sick, personal, or vacation day." HR-speak; Orwellian, isn't it? In all fairness, many companies have addressed these issues and have instituted flex time and other modernized policies; however, don't believe that the issues, especially regarding IT staffers, have been fully addressed
With the advent of technology and the IT staffs who implement, upgrade, maintain, and support it, we have entered into an entirely new paradigm of what is considered a work day. We have blasted through the fourth wall, and it is not likely that the wall will ever be repaired. We can't go back. So the only thing we can do is move forward and seek to create humane human resource policies that reflect the new order of things and not hang on to archaic policies that only confuse and annoy the very people—the IT staffers, in particular—who enable companies to do business. Morale is already a serious issue, and American workers are by far the most stressed workers in the industrial world. We get the least amount of vacation time and have to fight for legitimate personal time. Maybe productivity would improve if we stopped nickel-and-diming these people and compensated them fairly for their efforts.
Maria A. DeGiglio is President of, and Principal Analyst for, Maria A. DeGiglio & Associates, an advisory firm that provides clients with accurate and actionable information on business and technology initiatives. You can reach Ms. DeGiglio at
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