The Productivity Line
As the global financial crisis begins to bite, owners of any sort of business need to revisit a fairly basic question: how productive are we?
Any examination of business productivity usually tends to focus on inputs and outputs. Some of these are easy to measure: time, materials, staff numbers, finished units, sales. However, for the administrative side of a business or for service-oriented firms, there is a whole raft of productivity factors that are much harder to measure on a balance sheet. Heading this list is the humble computer. Indeed, the device that has done so much to improve productivity over the last two decades can also be one of the biggest drains on a firm's time and money.
Broadly speaking, the ways in which computers can affect productivity include the technical and the human. Technical factors cover productivity losses brought on by equipment or software performance. The human factors, often harder to measure revolve around what employees do with their computers and how much of their time is spent on things other than company business.
In this latter category comes ‘cyber slacking’. That is, excessive use of Internet access for personal activities or just sheer time wasting. The cost of this to workplaces in Australia is estimated to be up to $5 billion dollars a year in lost productivity alone. Studies indicate that employees with Internet access spend an average of two hours a day on non-work related browsing, with about 40% of all their web time being personal. So for an employee on a salary of $50,000, their firm is paying $12 - $20,000 per year just to let them surf the web.
And whilst in the past there were concerns about workers looking at inappropriate or offensive Web material, these days it is social networking sites and travel planning that are the chief Internet abuses. Several studies show that nearly 50% of all companies polled are concerned enough about workers using Facebook and MySpace that they have taken measures to block access to these sites. Meanwhile, a survey in January 2009 estimated that in Australia about 27 million hours of employee time is spent online organizing or daydreaming about future holidays.
Employee Internet abuse affects productivity not just in terms of lost hours. Malware, viruses and the like are often propagated via the same websites that business owners are concerned about for other reasons. Sometimes inexperienced computer users wind up connecting to these sites inadvertently, either through a re-direct or by clicking on a link in an innocent-looking email.
Time and money spent dealing with security and virus issues then starts to become a productivity drain in its own right. Whilst this can be the case in any firm, smaller businesses are even more exposed because they don’t tend to have dedicated IT staff on hand to fix problems. The task then falls to other employees or managers, likely without the skills and knowledge to solve the issues quickly or effectively. Alternatively an expensive emergency fix or upgrade may be required from a third party technician in an attempt to ‘shut the door after the horse has already bolted'.
Whilst few employers would advocate a complete ban on Internet access or wish to implement a draconian atmosphere of supervision, the use of managed network services such as NetAssure can certainly go a long way to addressing some of the issues arising from employee computer use. With the control and reporting functions of NetAssure, businesses can have the peace of mind that they are taking every reasonable step to ensure their productivity during tough economic times.