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Simple Steps to Increase Productivity

Written by: Robert Rutherford

Article Overview: I see many organisations every week that simply see IT as a cost. This thought bothers me, as if engineered correctly the benefits of an IT investment can be clear, dare I say it ‘exciting’ for a business. I'm going to just give you a few quick, free or relatively cheap changes you can implement in your business that can make a dramatic impact on your productivity, and thus increase profit.

Simple Steps to Increase Productivity

IT systems and infrastructure can enable or hamper business. You may be enabled and prospering from the IT within your organisation, but is everything running as well as it could be?

There are of course many areas where productivity gains can be made, and it all depends on your organisation and the environment. I’ve recommend a number of major and easy to implement solutions below, most of which are free or relatively low-cost with a clear and measurable return on your investment.


• Control Internet Access - The figures and statistics vary, but through years of analysis and real experience the average business loses 15 minutes per day per member of staff browsing the internet during work hours for non-work related purposes. If you have 20 employees then it’s simply 25 hours per week wasted (if you are lucky)

This can be quickly addressed through an Employee Internet Management system. This basically means reporting on where your staff are going and/or restricting them by specific categories and setting quotas of time for non-work related internet access.

• Control Instant Messaging - Instant messaging, such as MSN and Yahoo Messenger, even Skype within an organisation can be a productivity gain or a productivity drain. If your users can chat to family and friends while at work then you are probably haemorrhaging productivity in a big way. It wouldn’t be uncommon for some users to spend an hour a day chatting to friend outside of the company.

You can stop Instant Messaging completely, get a system that monitors your staff, or get a system that allows you to control who your staff chat to.

• SPAM - The average amount of time reading and deleting SPAM is 5 minutes per user per day and rising. It sounds trivial, but if you have 50 users then this is over 4 hours per day of productive time wasted.

There is a wealth of SPAM management solutions on the market. You will find that most vendors will offer a free trial and pricing is clear, allowing for relatively clear ROI.

• PC Specifications and Configuration - Keep your PC specifications and configurations to a good standard. If a PC takes 5 minutes more than normal starting up, which is common then that’s over 8 hours a week gone for a 20 employee operation. If you also take into account the time opening files and generally running slowly then you can look to at least another 5 minutes per PC on average, another 8 hours.

A simple PC clean up, removing non –business related software and data, or a small hardware upgrade, such as increased RAM (system memory) can make a real difference and pay back the investment in a few weeks.

• Control PC's - In many organisations both large and small, employees have full control over their PC’s, meaning that they change what they like, load what they like, and basically do what they like. If you add your IT support bill of fixing problems down to 'dodgy software' or employees making unnecessary changes to configuration your costs soar. You also of course have the issue of your staff using the non-business related software, thus further decreasing productivity.

The answer is to not allow your staff 'administrator rights' on their PC's. I can’t think of many scenarios where staff should have the freedom to load what they like.

• Server Health and Specification - Keep your servers maintained. Just look at it as a car, you need to ensure it is kept up-to-date, manage small problems spotted before they grow into large ones. A system outage or a slow system will cost your business in measurable terms, i.e. what would the business costs be if your systems are down for 1hr, 4hrs, a day, week, etc?

Servers are complex, and weekly housekeeping needs to be undertaken. There is a wealth of monitoring tools and systems which will spot any issues before they turn into business affecting problems. A business continuity plan should also be in place to manage extended outages.


I have been conservative on the estimated productivity loss in this short article. If you don’t have any real control on your systems then you could easily be losing 40 minutes per computer based employee per day. As well as the direct productivity loss you need to think about the extra costs incurred in your business, such as increased IT support costs and lost business revenue. It should also be noted that not controlling many of the listed areas will also leave your business at risk from a security perspective.

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Article Tags: 15 minutes, amount of time, browsing the internet, control internet, employee internet management, family and friends, free trial, infrastructure, instant messaging, internet access control, internet management system, investment control, management solutions, measurable return, msn, productive time, productivity gain, productivity gains, quotas, statistics



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