Everyone has heard the business principle ‘time is money’ at least once in their professional careers. While it may often sound like a backhanded way of saying wasting time is also wasting money, you’d be surprised to find out just how much time is wasted by employees throughout various industries. It may seem obvious, with how much time employees spend on their phone, or gossiping with one another in the breakroom or just mindlessly browsing the internet. However, these issues don’t even scratch the surface in regards to productivity issues in the office. This post will focus on time lost in office-oriented jobs, specifically in regards to IT-related challenges.
If you previously thought IT-related problems only plagued the productivity of the IT-team, you couldn’t be anymore wrong. The average employee will waste nearly 22 minutes per day in the office trying to resolve their IT-related issues. Let’s look at that week-over-week, or worse, year-over-year. Per week, 22 minutes a day comes out to nearly an hour and a half of lost time in the office. Per year? Nearly two weeks of wasted time. There’s a lot that can be done in an hour and a half, there’s even more that can be accomplished with two weeks’ worth of time in the office. Knowing just how severe an impact this can have on the productivity of businesses, resolving these issues should be priority number one.
It can be challenging to solve a problem without first recognizing what the problem is though. Unfortunately, the number of IT-related problems an employee can face are nearly endless. They include issues such as poor Wi-Fi or network provider coverage, inadequate battery life on mobile or laptop devices, organization-wide applications failing and even hardware failure in the most severe cases. As previously mentioned, a number of these issues aren’t able to be resolved in a timely manner, they often require a great deal of patience out of both employees and supporting IT staff.
What’s even more detrimental to an employee’s productivity levels is when they fail to report these issues to their supporting IT staff. Granted, those that do report their issues often spend anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour with IT staff trying to troubleshoot the issue, those that fail to do so could plague their productivity for much longer than that. Unfortunately, any issue an employee faces is bound to cause some form of stress. A majority of time, this stress comes in the form of falling behind on their responsibilities and feeling as though they won’t be able to get back on track. These feelings often cause a distraction that can last upwards of thirty minutes before they’re able to regain focus on the task at hand.
It would seem that fighting the never-ending battle with productivity can be more of a challenge than most organizations would ever be prepared for. However, there are methods in which organizations can prepare for any of the IT-related issues their employees may face while on the job. The first would certainly have to be prioritizing upgraded hardware for employees. New equipment would alleviate any battery malfunction that older equipment may have faced, as well as solving any application incompatibility that older devices may have experienced. Keeping these new devices safe is also paramount and this can be accomplished through a well-established cyber security strategy. Keeping employees safe from different viruses or phishing schemes should help maintain the health of their hardware. Finally, investing in a business line with the best local internet provider should solve any network connectivity issues that employees face on a regular basis. These are just some of the ways in which organizations can combat their IT-related productivity issues. For more information regarding ways to resolve these issues in a more timely manner, be sure to check out the infographic coupled alongside this post. Courtesy of Time Technology.
