There is nothing more frustrating than slow computers. It’s frustrating for your employees, your customers and even you as a business owner. As businesses adopt new applications to innovate and overload employees with increasing workload demands, if they are not keeping up with regular maintenance on computers it can seriously impact the speed of the machine. This is particularly true if they aren’t replacing their computers on a regular basis. A few seconds here or there may not seem like a lot – but the increase in user frustration and decrease in productivity could be negatively impacting employee turnover and bottom line. Don’t believe me? Here are some pretty interesting statistics about slow workstations, productivity and lost revenue.
They’re making your employees mad and costing them time.
A UK study of PC and laptop users found that slow computers are causing 30% of employee bad moods. According to the study, completed by SanDisk, users lost more than 130 hours of time to slow-loading computers, applications and files. That’s a lot of downtime.
Slow load time is time wasted.
Every moment that our employees are sitting at their desks should be used effectively. You want to make sure you’re giving your employees the tools and resources to be as productive as possible, yet employees are waiting up to 12 minutes for their machine to load at any given time. That’s a lot of wasted time.
Lost profits in real dollars.
How can you calculate the actual lost revenue from the statistics in this study? Say the average salary in your office runs about $50,000. Say you have 25 users in your organization, all of which are suffering at the same level from a productivity perspective. This is approximately $24 per hour. Based on the 130 hours of time wasted annually per user, that’s $3,120 per employee. Now multiply that by 25 employees and that’s $78,000. Multiply that by a few different office locations and you can see why workstation refreshes are so important for SMBs.
What you can do.
If you’re struggling to find the budget for a full workstation overhaul, here are some tips for getting your workstations to a more efficient operating level:
- Defragment your drives
- Do a full system clean up (temp files, cookies, files, etc)
- Regular malware sweeps
- Uninstall any programs that aren’t being used
- Scan and clean your registry
Many of these things can be done by you, but engaging a professional will make everything much easier, since many managed services providers have automation tools for all of the above actions.
When productivity is eating into your bottom line, you can’t help but be upset about it. You spend hundreds of hours trying to get your processes and workflows down to increase efficiently and it can be frustrating when you have to wait to replace workstations. Partner up with a trustworthy provider that can work within your budget to make to help you make the most productive use of your resources.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: Are Slow Workstations Eating Away Your Profit Margin?
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