SOS: my support team is drowning
Sometimes there are no good choices
I’ve been writing for a while now about how to make a well-functioning support organization, either by starting from scratch or by making incremental improvements to an existing team. But the more I write, the more I think to myself:
Be honest. How much of this advice would you yourself have been able to take in past roles? How much of this is completely pie-in-the-sky thinking that isn’t actually practical for anyone?
Well, imaginary interlocutor, I won’t go so far as to say my advice is impractical for everyone. But it’s not going to be practical in every situation. Sometimes you find yourself in a position where, frankly, you’re just trying to keep your own head, and your team’s metaphorical head, above water. Or off the chopping block, or whatever head-related metaphor you’d prefer. Sometimes it’s all you can do to get through the day without losing any more ground. This post is for you.
Your situation
Your team is overworked, probably underappreciated, and barely holding it together. They’re working long hours, and you’re working even longer than that to make sure that nothing slips through the cracks. You’re being pulled in dozens of directions, and your own boss has just told you there’s no room in the budget for anything—no new tools, no new headcount, and if you can’t start meeting your team goals (which you had nothing to do with setting), you might not even be able to keep all of your current team much longer. You need to figure out how to turn things around, and fast. Here’s how to put together that plan.
Take stock
Before anything else, you need to understand, intimately, exactly what is going on with your team.
What are they spending their time on? Sit down with each team member in turn and get a feel for how they’re spending their days. How many hours on ticket handling? How many on bug reporting? How much on writing documentation? And so on. Make sure these conversations are open-ended—let them tell you what they’ve been doing, rather than having preconceived notions. You may be surprised.
Who are they getting their marching orders from? Many of us in the support world got into this line of work because we like solving problems for people and like helping folks, but those motivations can easily work against us when we’ve already got too much to do. If your team is taking on tasks directly from people outside the support team, that has to end immediately. If, on the other hand, you’re the one who’s been piling on ancillary duties, then you need to do better.
What is blocking them? Lack of access to critical systems, lack of response when they need help from elsewhere in the company, all of these things can lead to even simple tasks taking ten times as long. If there are any common themes among your team about what is keeping them from doing their job efficiently, it’s important to find that out now if you don’t already know.
Remember your raison d’être
Support teams exist for one reason. It’s right there in the name. If your inventory of team tasks includes things that are not directly reported to supporting customers, maybe you shouldn’t be doing them anymore.
Now is a good time to sit down with your own leadership. Lay out your findings and remind them of why your team exists in the first place. Ask them this:
Given that our team is here to provide customer support, which of these activities are core to that mission? Which of them are not?
Ideally there will be consensus among your chain of command that some of the things your team is currently doing can be set aside, and you’re able to commit to refocusing on what company leadership understands to be the core role of your team. If you get conflicting answers from different people up and down the chain, or if they insist that your team continue to do all of the same things, you’ll need to change your tactics. It’s important that you get clarity at this stage because of these two facts:
You need to lighten the load on your team
Somebody is going to be unhappy about every task you choose to stop doing
As such, leadership cover is essential because you’re going to be making some unpopular changes. If you can’t get that cover from your immediate leadership team, you’ll have to escalate until you find someone capable of making those decisions.
If you’re not able to get a solid answer from anyone above you, your hand may be forced—you’ll have to decide yourself, and be prepared for the inevitable disappointment from other company stakeholders who you’re leaving in the lurch.
Cut back aggressively, and make sure everyone knows it
Armed with a mandate from leadership (hopefully), it’s time to start refocusing the team. While the last stage was all about communicating up the chain, now it’s time to have frank conversations with your own team and with other teams, especially the ones you’ll no longer be doing tasks for.
With your own team, it’s important to convey the following points:
The team has been struggling for some time
You’ve talked to the team and seen that you’ve all been taking on too many responsibilities
Effective immediately, you’ll be refocusing on [core team activities] and no longer doing [other specific activities]
You’ll be communicating this same message to other teams in the company
You need their help to hold this new boundary by declining to take on additional tasks unless assigned directly by you or other support leadership
For your own part, you will be vigilant in maintaining the new, more sustainable, team workload by being more selective in accepting additional work for the team
When speaking to other team leadership, a shorter version of the above will suffice. Be very specific on two points, however:
Requests to resume tasks that you’ve officially paused will not be entertained
Requests for the support team to do other additional tasks must come through you, and will likely not be accepted until the team is able to take on more work
Then hold to this! As I mentioned before it’s always tempting to do favors for other teams, but right now the support team simply can’t afford to do anything outside its core activities.
Sometimes all this isn’t enough
It was only last week that we were talking about preventing burnout. You may have noticed that pretty much all of my suggestions above run directly counter to what I said about burnout! When you’re trying to keep the team running and you don’t have enough resources to do it the right way, it can usually be done—but the price to be paid is often in your team’s quality of life. The level of refocusing on core duties that may be necessary here is going to prevent people from doing those various non-ticket-related tasks that help keep things interesting. Maybe someone on your team really loved working on documentation, and now you’re taking that away from them in the interest of actually getting all of your support tickets resolved in a timely manner. It is a necessary change, but be aware that you may lose them over it.
In the short run, making the changes above will help your team successfully handle its core duties. In the longer run, however, the only way to keep a team running under trying circumstances is a combination of focusing on the core duties of the role in conjunction with actually increasing headcount to reflect the support load your team is dealing with. If your leadership won’t let you do one or the other, you may be in for a difficult ride.
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