12/01/2025

Keeping the Lights On: Quantifying Value in a Thankless Job

By Arissa Freeman

Identifying the Unsung

Operational support roles, such as accounting, information technology and administration, are tasked with ‘keeping the lights on’ (i.e., being a visible sign that the business is open and running). These functions contribute to the bottom line by enabling, enhancing, and maintaining operations. This is a contrast to front-facing teams, such as sales and development, whose efforts increase revenue or show other obvious impact. Some examples of support-based roles:

• Payroll staff ensures every employee’s direct deposit arrives on time and in full. This sounds straightforward until a company’s size and various pay structures are factored in.  
• The Human Resources team not only manages benefits, talent acquisition, and compensation. They also are considered the company’s primary culture champions and lead employee conflict resolution.
• IT support and system administrators work 24/7, sometimes globally, to maintain software, protect data, and ensure smooth technical operations. Fixing keyboards might be one small part of their comprehensive role.
• Roles like administrative support or project management exist to drive larger initiatives through cross-team relationships, task management, and heavy communication. The intangible benefits of having these professionals on hand are clear, but hard to calculate.

A career practitioner can help clients working in support roles to articulate concrete metrics that demonstrate how their work enhances or protects their organizations’ bottom lines.

The Cost of Uncertainty

In today’s talent market, a strategic recognition program is as much a retention strategy as it is a culture booster. Neglecting recognition can lead to employee disengagement and potential turnover.

• In a 2024 Gallup study of employees who voluntarily left their roles in the past year, 45% reported having zero discussion with their leadership about their job satisfaction, performance or future with the organization in the three months prior to leaving (Tatel & Wigert, 2024).
• Employee replacement could cost anywhere from 40% of a frontline worker’s salary to 200% of a manager’s (Yi, 2024).
• Alternatively, well-recognized employees participating in Gallup’s study were 45% less likely to turn over after two years (Tatel & Wigert, 2024).

The Struggle to Quantify Value

Despite the undeniable need for those in support roles, several factors hinder their proper recognition:

• Their grace hides the complexity. When a business-critical system goes down, the scope of the problem is respected even if not entirely understood. But for many support roles, even daily tasks require heavy communication and lengthy processes that they typically navigate with poise.
• Their roles do not focus on quantity. Keeping the lights on does not glorify the number of problems solved. Rather, it is based on their prevention. Assigning dollars and cents to potential risks that didn’t happen is difficult
• Their bar is incredibly high. An accountant wouldn’t be worth their fee—and might cause a client to incur heavy ones—if their math was only right 80 or 90 percent of the time. In professions where success demands near-perfection, it is hard to determine what constitutes ‘above and beyond.’

The Career Practitioner’s Role

The above factors, plus personal challenges of daily life, can cause clients to feel disconnected from their support systems on and off the job. As career practitioners, it is first necessary to help clients unravel the components lending to the disconnection.

Each practitioner has their own methods to outline emotional and professional angst. In her article, “Why Talented People Disengage Quietly”, Executive and Leadership Coach Sunitha Narayanan shared a powerful technique to create a safe, action-oriented space for clients. It includes ranking satisfaction levels across several aspects of life (called the Wheel of Life Exercise) and establishing permission to identify and work with difficult emotions. Clients are guided through exercises to re-evaluate their job descriptions in terms of values, interests, and skills as opposed to the inventory of tasks supplied by the employer (Narayanan, 2017).

From that place of safety and clarity, clients can then add quantities to the quality they bring to their work teams.

Tips to Identify Value

Luckily, there are methods career practitioners can recommend that help quantify and promote seemingly intangible results.

• Create an e-Trail. Support pros resolve and prevent issues of various magnitudes daily. It is a struggle to verbalize them all during an annual review. A fix for this is to keep a digital record that tracks the near-misses, emergency requests, and emails they receive for their daily tasks.  
• Consult Their Network. When it is time to calculate contributions, support teams need to look no further than the results their supported organizations celebrated. Take, for example, a project manager. To someone not as close to the operation, closing five projects in a calendar year may not seem impressive. But when those projects save the Operations team considerable labor hours or reduce notable monetary risks for Compliance, their business value is clear.
• Focus on the Improvements. Quality will always trump quantity, especially when dealing with process-driven work. Ideas that reduce complexity, shorten turnaround time, or otherwise improve processes are one of the best value-add opportunities a support worker can offer.  
• Talk About It. The best way to ensure awareness is communication. If direct managers don’t offer dedicated time for 1:1 meetings, clients should request at least a monthly dedicated session. In those meetings, they should focus on development goals, recent wins, and ways they can support their leader outside of the day-to-day task load.

Helping the Lightkeepers Shine

Not every organizational role is highly visible.  Growth requires consistent feedback amongst leadership and internal customers. Career practitioners play a crucial role in guiding clients in this effort. Coaching individuals to systematically gather feedback, quantify their contributions, and craft compelling career narratives will help convert their impacts to advancement opportunities and professional fulfillment.

References  

Narayanan, S. (2017, March 1). Why talented people disengage quietly. Career Convergence. https://careerconvergence.org/"https://www.gallup.com/workplace/646538/employee-turnover-preventable-often-ignored.aspx" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://www.gallup.com/workplace/646538/employee-turnover-preventable-often-ignored.aspx 

Yi, R.. (2024, September 18). Employee retention depends on getting recognition right. Gallup.     https://www.gallup.com/workplace/650174/employee-retention-depends-getting-recognition-right.aspx 

Arissa Freeman is a certified career coach and resume writer based in Atlanta, GA. Prior to launching her coaching practice, Triumphant Coaching Services, LLC, she spent 15 years supporting various industry leaders in Human Resources, Information Technology and Project Management. Connect with Arissa via her website, www.triumphantcs.com and at www.linkedin.com/in/arissafreeman.