Super stressed in my Service Desk Manager role - Help 🥲
Hello all!
I'll try not make this too long, but whoever does read this and can offer any advice I would appreciate it so much.
Long story short, I managed to aquire a Service Desk Manager role just under 3 months ago with this company. I have not worked in IT before, but do have managerial experience in completely different industries, with my main strengths being customer service - I am not technical enough to do a 1st Line support role and above let's say.
This company has been quite chaotic for a number of years, with high turnover of staff and previous managers. I knew this prior to joining, and knew there would be big challenges, as even them offering me the role is something that would ideally of never of happened.
During my first month or two, I really gelled with the team trying to understand all their issues and Bottlenecks, using my previous experience and recent ITIL 4 foundation certainly helped. The main issues were:
- Desk severely understaffed
- All work for reactive
- Upper management have extreme micromanaging of staff
- Personal issues between service desk staff and upper manager (you vs them dynamic)
- Communication is very poor
- Due to the above, staff did not feel appreciated, burnout, no downtime to develop etc
Despite me gelling with the team, 2 members of staff handed in their notice as there were a couple of personal clashes with the upper management/owner - Which the upper management didn't need to pursue, and this has effectively pushed those staff over the edge.
With one of these techs having most of the knowledge, I now have a team who doesn't have anyone to teach. We recently had 2 more 2nd line techs, along with a 1st Line, but the issue is that none of these guys know the companies systems inside and out like the previous techs. The company work with clients on site offering in person support, so sometimes the desk only have one person covering 60 clients with the remote support... The owner (who has a lot of tech knowledge) is always out, but very poor at communication and always blames his staff for lack of development.
Now I'm being put under pressure to deliver progress, and seems like nothing I do is quite enough. I am seeing this as an opportunity to turn a new chapter for the company, but having a new line of staff not tied to the companies previous dramas. But I'm very stressed trying to teach them when I don’t have the technical knowledge, or expertise in navigating the system to even help them direct where to find answers within the tickets.
So yes, this is where I'm at. I just want to help the staff learn, make the desk stable and satisfy the company. But its very hard. The upper management is a big issue, as they constantly blame the desk, don't interact or provide the foundations of support, then wonder why nothing progresses and staff aren't happy. But I feel responsible for this, and notice I'm feeling a lot more anxiety.
So the setup now is this
- Two 2nd line techs (new to company and don't know how to navigate our systems and need to improve technical knowledge)
- One first line tech, but often is out on site rather than in office. Has knowledge, but feels burnout
- One new first line tech starting in 30 days, done A+ but needs to develop 365 knowledge which the majority of our tickets require
Just very stressed as one of the 2nd line techs who's leaving in 5 days knows all the systems and is great, but can't show it all in 5 days.
Overall stressed for the future, but any advice would really appreciate.
Thank you to anyone who's read this 🙏