Report: IT workers experiencing increasingly inconsistent and heavy workloads

IT workers have been experiencing inconsistent and heavy workloads this year ever since the shift to remote work. According to PagerDuty’s 2021 State of Digital Operations report, over a third of PagerDuty’s users worked on average two extra hours per day, which comes out to an extra 12 weeks of work per year. 

Respondents also faced more interruptions to work during their personal time. Respondents cited a 9% increase in the amount of work-related tasks to be done between the hours of 6PM and 10PM. In addition, there was a 7% increase in the amount of interruptions during holidays or weekends. 

Burned out users (those in the top 10% of workers facing interruptions) had 19 interruptions during their non-working hours over the course of a month. This is a 10x increase over the median responder, PagerDuty explained.

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According to PagerDuty, each IT incident took an average of 1.2 responders and 126 minutes minutes to get resolved. 

The severity of incidents also increased. From 2019 to 2020 there was a 19% increase in critical incidents. The increase was highest in the travel/hospitality and telecom industries. The report indicated that every month companies experienced an average of 105 critical incidents.

Overall, incident acknowledgement time has decreased over the past five years despite the increase in incidents. Large companies are the most successful in this reduction, bringing the time from six minutes to under four minutes. 

ChatOps adoption also increased by 22%, and it helped fill the void of in-person interactions as more and more companies went remote. 

“Today, digital operations are a core business strategy. That means more complex systems, more rapid rates of change, and more pressure on the teams tasked with keeping those operations running smoothly,” said Sean Scott, chief product officer at PagerDuty. “Digital operations maturity is the difference between preventing an incident before it begins, and losing customers because it takes too long to remediate an issue. With this report, PagerDuty is sharing our unique insights on how the right practices can help organizations unburden their teams and bring order and intelligence to operations management.”