Is "DIY IT" Holding Your Business Back?

This article was contributed by Electric, a trusted partner of Justworks.

For many small businesses, IT is shaped by a series of quick fixes: shared logins for each new app, spreadsheets to keep track of company devices, and a growing list of tools that don’t always talk to each other. 

In the early days, scrappy IT seems fast and flexible. But as the business scales, this patchwork approach starts to unravel. Managing IT with spreadsheets and ad hoc processes isn’t just inefficient, it becomes a security and compliance risk.

The DIY Trap

In a startup environment, getting employees, devices, and applications up and running takes priority — a laptop purchase here, a new software license there. But over time, this agility gives way to errors and confusion. Devices begin to glitch, employees get locked out of critical accounts, and security becomes a guessing game. 

HR is often left to pick up the pieces, but a lack of IT integration has knock on effects for the entire business:

• Productivity Drag: Employees lose hours of work troubleshooting devices, figuring out access, and waiting for login credentials.

• Security and Compliance Risks: Unsecured devices, inconsistent user permissions, and haphazard offboarding all create security and compliance risks.

• Opportunity Cost: when HR and other teams get bogged down in repetitive admin, strategic planning and the employee experience suffer.

• Scalability Limits: as your business grows, compounding IT inefficiencies can slow momentum and impact your ability to scale.

Scaling Exposes Weak Links in IT

We recently sat down with a COO who found herself facing a challenge familiar to many fast-growing startups: scaling people and systems faster than the infrastructure beneath them.

With plans to triple headcount in just six weeks, they were bringing their outsourced field team in-house — but their tech ecosystem hadn’t kept pace. There was little visibility, limited flexibility, and hardly any control. The talent they were attracting was accustomed to enterprise-grade IT, yet onboarding lagged, offboarding dragged, and their existing equipment was both overpriced and oversized for their needs.

Her story highlights a common problem at many smaller businesses — as headcount increases, so does the complexity of your IT environment. 

Onboarding

Each new hire involves setting up devices, accounts, apps, user permissions, and more. Without a standardized workflow, this process is susceptible to mistakes and delays — frustrating new employees, wasting HR resources, and slowing productivity.

Offboarding 

In a brief offboarding window, HR must revoke system access, retrieve devices, and transfer ownership of accounts. In the case of involuntary departures, this turnaround is particularly time sensitive. Any gaps can undermine security and create headaches for remaining employees.

Device Management

Purchasing, shipping, and provisioning devices is just the beginning. Hardware must be tracked, software updated, and security monitored. When an employee leaves, devices need to be retrieved, wiped, and stored or reassigned. At scale, manual device management becomes a full-time job.

App Management

Granting individual user permissions and manually tracking app access is unsustainable. Without real-time visibility and control, there is a high risk of data exposure, wasted licenses, and lost productivity when employees can’t access the tools they need.

HR Teams are Overloaded and Under-Equipped

In most small businesses, these responsibilities fall to HR teams that don’t have the resources or expertise to resolve legacy IT issues — particularly while juggling competing responsibilities across payroll, benefits, operations, and compliance. 

For People teams, strategic work is replaced with putting out fires and manually managing broken workflows:

• 42% of HR professionals have less time to spend on recruitment and retention due to IT limitations.  

• 55% of organizations struggle to integrate HR technologies into existing systems, leading to inefficiencies and data silos.

• 24% cite a lack of internal expertise or support as a barrier to implementing HR technology.

Electric seamlessly integrates with Justworks, keeping your HR and IT processes working together to help ensure employees have what they need on day one — and that devices and access are secured when they leave.

A Smarter, Scalable Way to Manage People and Technology

By integrating HR and IT, small businesses can automate repetitive processes, streamline operations, and maintain security. According to a recent report:

• 64% of senior IT decision makers believe HR and IT will merge within the next 5 years

• 93% predict this merger will boost employee productivity and enhance their experience

• 94% believe the merging of HR and IT could accelerate digital transformation

The result is a smarter, more coordinated back office where small business HR and IT work in lockstep from day one. Get started today.