I once had a CEO tell me what type of business I was in. Rather than the obvious 'you guys fix computer problems', he gave me a rather different job description when he stated, 'you're in the business of removing excuses from my staff'. He was quite right, when a company's IT systems are not performing it can be a great excuse for staff to not hit the mark on their KPI's.
Over the past couple of years, we've found that the following 'productivity killers' effect most businesses in one form or another.
The Top 5 Productivity Killers
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Slow Computer - no surprises here. If a staff member's PC is slow to start up in the morning and if it takes ages for programs to load or documents to save then that staff member is going to get frustrated and, after a few weeks with that computer, will give up trying to work around the computer's lack of speed and will simply slow down. PCs are often considered an 'expensive overhead' but if you compare the price of a new PC every three years compared to an annual salary that you are only getting 80% out there really is no excuse for not sorting this out.
Action Item: Get your IT support to review all PCs and consider replacing anything that is over 4 years old. Another way to look at it is if it has Windows XP and less than 512Mb of RAM, it probably needs to be replaced.
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Online Distractions - Facebook, MSN Chat, Skype Chat, reading the paper online. This stuff saps hours out of our staff's day and when you multiply one hour of 'web surfing' by 229 business days in a year and an hourly rate of $25, this equates to $5725! Now you you might say to yourself, none of my staff are spending an hour per day surfing but experience shows us that in some cases, its much longer!
Action Item: Get serious about computer and internet usage in your office and set a clear policy with your team about what the computer systems are to be used for (business only) and that you reserve the right to monitor activity. Consider putting in place monitoring and/or blocking of productivity killing websites and talk to your IT support for advice.
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Email Distractions - Jokes sent from friends are the obvious one here but have you ever considered how much time staff spend when they read emails that they are unnecessarily copied into? I once was involved in a situation where a staff member had been emailing her boyfriend during the day and it was noticed by her Manager. A review of the email logs identified that she'd averaged over 120 small emails per day to him!
Just like internet use, email is a tool that you put in place for business and you need to ensure that your team are minimising personal use.
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Lack of Training - this one is incredibly common. Most employers hire an employee with the assumption that they will be productive with their tools. In office jobs, the tool is a computer and the software on it. The problem is that the employee will most likely never inform their boss that they are not very good at using a computer or software package as they perceive that this might lower their employer's opinion of them.
Action Item: You should consider talking to each of your team members and asking them to rate their skill level on each of the software packages that they need to access to perform their role (Basic, Good, Advanced). If your staff spend more than an hour on a computer each day, they need to be either Good or Advanced in each software package. If they are not, software training courses are readily available online and are very cost effective.
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'Distractifications' - do your staff get those little envelope notifications pop up on their screen when a new email comes in? Do they also get one on their smart phone? What about those annoying little pop ups that the antivirus has updated itself, or that the printer has finished printing a page. My personal pet hate is when Adobe needs to be updated... again.
When your staff are working on a computer, most of the time its completing a transaction, spreadsheet or document. If they are interrupted all of the time, then this is going to cause them to spend a lot of time asking themselves "now where was I?".
Action Item: Talk to your IT people about quelling the alerts and train your staff to turn things off that they don't need. A great tip is to get people to close out of email when they don't need it and then to open it at set intervals (e.g. 2 hours). This way, they can focus on the job at hand and work on emails in batches.
Most of the stuff above is common sense and some of it probably applies to your office workers. What business people need to consider is
what is the compound impact of a single employee suffering from 3 of these issues every day?
