Over the past three weeks, we have examined the IT department’s cultural and stress issues and discussed how to fix them. Yet, many areas affected by the IT problems are under board oversight. Thus, for the final article in Stress Awareness Month, let us examine why boards should pay closer attention to the burnout issues plaguing IT departments and why they must seriously oversee corporate culture, talent pipelines, and shareholder value.
Corporate Culture includes the IT Department
In most companies, the board sets the corporate mission, vision, and matching strategy. A crucial part of the strategy is the corporate culture. It touches everything from employee engagement to the company’s innovativeness. Thus, building a working corporate culture that benefits the whole company is high on the board and upper-level management list.
Yet, the disconnect between the company and its IT department also reaches into the boardroom. From misunderstandings about the IT department’s needs to missed chances, many boards are uninformed, and some are even apathetic about IT.
Consequently, there is little pushback against IT becoming that little island with its culture. Yet, the department’s culture significantly contributes to the staff’s stress. Thus, boards should not abdicate their responsibility for it.
Human Resources Depend on Culture
Finding board members with a cybersecurity background is challenging. Recruiters and the boards themselves routinely complain about it. Yet, all too often, the talent pipeline for IT and cybersecurity experts dries up before talent becomes ready to take up the top positions.
With managerial stress and burnout being industry-wide problems, boards should recognize that their talent pipeline is at risk if they do not retain the best managers. High turnover prevents leaders from becoming executives, which harms companies in the long run. After all, searching for talent outside your organization is more expensive. Additionally, with the tight labor market in IT and cybersecurity, longer search times might compound the stress within the IT department as responsibilities shift further down.
Consequently, the cultural and stress issue becomes a talent issue that will persist in the near and the far future.
Shareholder Value after Incidents
Lastly, issues within the cybersecurity culture and the stress associated with a failed culture trickle down to the performance. Ransomware incidents and cybersecurity attacks are at an all-time high. Iranian criminals are attacking our water supplies and ATMs while Russia-backed groups wreak havoc on the US healthcare sector. Consequently, cybersecurity costs, from ransom payments via new technologies to cyber insurance, are reaching all-time highs.
The preventive costs, the reputational price, and the lost customer income heavily impact a company’s profits and, thus, shareholder value. Consequently, boards must tackle the cultural failures and burnout epidemic in IT from the shareholder value perspective. After all, if the human perspective isn’t sufficient to spurn company leadership into action, the increasing returns and bottom line should be adequate.
A Pressure Tank is never a good Culture
The increasing rates of turnover in cybersecurity, the lack of talent growing upwards in companies, and the deteriorating culture should all be signs that oversight is lacking. However, with the increasing cybersecurity risks, we cannot allow the departments to be removed or decoupled from the broader companies. Boards must take their responsibilities seriously and ensure that the IT and cybersecurity departments are well integrated into companies. We have to ensure that these are workplaces that people enjoy. We must ensure that everyone in the IT department is motivated to solve the problem in case of an incident and not just look for the best way to protect their skin.
Shareholder value, talent pipelines, and corporate culture are all areas of oversight for the board. The fact that management can often abandon them in the IT department should be a reason for concern.