How to reduce staffing costs in high turn-over roles
Hiring new staff is always a costly exercise. According to the Centre for American Progress, the average cost of hiring a new worker equates to 20% of their annual salary. In some instances those costs went as high as 213% of annual salary.
This means that in the first year of employment, each employees costs your business 120% of their wages, plus other add-ons like National Insurance contributions and benefits.
Although significant, these costs are unavoidable – your data centre cannot function without sufficiently experienced and qualified technicians to perform general maintenance tasks.
A bearable cost. Or not.
In most cases, this 20% uplift is simply the cost of doing business; painful, but bearable – particularly if the employee stays in post for several years.
But for roles with a high rate of turnover – like data centre engineers – these costs are unsustainable. Paying a 20% premium for workers who stay less than 24 months in role will quickly eat into the IT budget. The more money spent on hiring technicians, the less there is available for strategic IT projects intended to carry the business forwards.
Ultimately, paying a 20% overhead cannot be justified for roles that are subject to a high staff turnover.
Pass the cost on
The most effective way to reduce costs incurred in hiring skilled data centre technicians is to outsource the staffing function altogether. Partnering with a Smart hands service provider like DACPros, guarantees access to the technicians required to keep your data centre systems running efficiently.
Should an engineer leave, the task of recruiting a replacement falls to the service provider. Not only do they absorb the 20% recruitment costs, but are also responsible for employer National Insurance contributions, and the cost of any benefits provided to the engineer.
Outsourcing offers additional valuable safeguards to your business too. Engineering services are typically provided with strict service level agreements to ensure that system uptime/availability is maintained at all times. Because both parties have “skin in the game”, there is an added incentive to keep your systems functioning optimally.
Even greater savings are available
Further savings can be realised through enhanced use of Smart hands services. Instead of having dedicated engineers in the data centre, your business has direct access to one or more technical experts who can attend site and work with your office based engineers remotely to provide diagnostics and support whenever required.
This approach provides a happy medium – you always have access to the technical expertise you need, without concerns of hand-over and knowledge transfer when an engineer leaves. Just because the outsourced model relieves your business of sourcing engineers, doesn’t mean that you automatically escape the usual issues once they are hired.
Data centre staffing costs cannot be avoided – but they can be managed and reduced without exposing your systems to risk. To learn more about how to reduce your staffing costs and securing the technical data centre skills your business needs, please get in touch.
