When productivity slips in a business, the cause may be difficult to pinpoint. A major outage gets everyone’s attention. So does a system that crashes or a cybersecurity incident that brings work to a halt. However, most business productivity problems are much quieter. They cost five minutes here, ten minutes there, until employees accept them as part of the workday.
That can make them surprisingly expensive. For businesses in Spokane, Washington, Medford, Oregon, and beyond, improving productivity may have less to do with asking employees to work faster and more to do with removing the little obstacles slowing them down. A good managed IT services partner can help identify those problems, particularly when technology and business processes have evolved together over several years. Here are 10 places worth looking.
1. Technology That’s Just a Little Too Slow
A computer that suddenly takes ten minutes to start clearly signals a problem. A computer that gradually gets slower over six months takes longer to notice. People adapt. They turn it on and make coffee. They open a program and answer an email while they wait. Eventually, nobody notices the delay because everyone has adapted.
Multiply those small delays across several employees and an entire year, and they begin to add up. Slow computers, applications, networks, and cloud services don’t have to stop working to cost a business money. Sometimes “technically working” is a pretty low bar.
Aging technology doesn’t only affect how quickly employees can complete routine tasks. It can also make more demanding work unnecessarily difficult. If that sounds familiar, check out these top IT upgrades to boost productivity for ideas that can make everyday work easier.
2. Constant Interruptions Slow Productivity
A password prompt pops up. A program freezes. Someone needs help finding a document. An employee has to stop what they’re doing and deal with the problem. The interruption itself might take two minutes. Getting back into the original task can take longer.
This is especially noticeable during work that requires concentration: writing a proposal, preparing financial information, solving a customer problem, or planning a project. Once that train of thought is interrupted, it usually takes a little rebuilding before the person is fully engaged again. One interruption doesn’t change much. A dozen of them scattered throughout the day can.
3. Unnecessary Searching Hurts Efficiency
Most businesses don’t have an information shortage. They have information everywhere. Customer records, contracts, emails, spreadsheets, meeting notes, proposals, invoices, shared folders, and documents are scattered across individual employees. The trouble starts when someone needs a particular piece of information and isn’t quite sure where it lives.
Was the newest version attached to an email? Is it in the network drive? Did someone save a copy locally? A three-minute search doesn’t seem significant. When employees repeat that search process throughout the week, it becomes one more quiet drain on efficiency.
The best productivity apps can make that easier by giving employees a more consistent way to store, share, and access information.
4. Repeatedly Entering the Same Information Slows Progress
Customer information may go into one system and then have to be copied to another. Perhaps an employee takes information from an email and manually enters it into a spreadsheet. Someone else later transfers those details into a different application.
These processes frequently have perfectly reasonable origins. The business added a new system or changed how it handled a particular job, and somebody found a workaround that kept everything moving. Years later, the workaround remains.
Besides taking time, repetitive data entry creates more opportunities for mistakes. If your company can implement these IT automation strategies, employees can spend less time supporting the process and more time on the actual work.
5. Processes With Unnecessary Steps Hinder Productivity
Ask an employee why a process has six steps, and you may hear, “That’s just how we’ve always done it.” That doesn’t necessarily mean the process was poorly designed. Businesses change. New technology, staffing changes, or a different workflow may make former methods obsolete.
The problem is that nobody goes back and removes it. Periodically walking through common processes from beginning to end can uncover approvals, handoffs, data entry, or other steps that no longer serve much purpose.
6. Too Many Messages in Too Many Places Create Confusion
Email. Teams or another messaging platform. Text messages. Video meetings. Shared workspaces. Notifications from business applications. Each tool can make communication easier. Together, they can also create a workday dominated by responding and reacting. An employee can spend an entire morning answering messages and attending meetings and still wonder at lunch why the project they intended to tackle hasn’t moved forward.
Communication matters. The question is whether every message requires an immediate interruption and whether employees know which messaging platforms to use for different kinds of information.
For teams working across different locations, choosing the right technology matters, too. Our guide to the best productivity tools for remote and hybrid teams covers tools that help employees communicate and collaborate without adding unnecessary complexity.
7. Systems That Don’t Work Well Together Slow Productivity
As businesses grow, they often add technology one piece at a time. One application handles accounting. Another handles customer relationships. Another manages projects. Someone introduces a new cloud service because it solves a particular problem.
Each choice may make sense. Collectively, the business can end up with a technology environment that requires employees to jump between systems, move information manually, or remember where different pieces of a job need to be completed. To run efficiently, businesses need comprehensive project management. That’s a good reason to occasionally look at the technology environment as a whole rather than evaluating each application separately.
Learn more about the small, often overlooked inefficiencies that can add up across a workday in Adept Networks’ guide, “The Productivity Leaks Hiding in Your Business.”
8. Security Problems Become Work Problems
Cybersecurity is usually discussed in terms of protecting systems and data. The less obvious benefit: keeping employees working.
Poorly managed passwords, access issues, old systems, compromised accounts, and other security problems can pull employees away from their regular responsibilities. A serious cyberattack can obviously create enormous disruption, but smaller security problems can create their own steady stream of delays. Well-managed security should protect the business without creating unnecessary friction for the people doing their jobs.
9. Paying for Tools You Aren’t Fully Using
Before adding another application to solve a productivity problem, it’s worth looking at the technology the business already owns. Microsoft 365 is a good example. Depending on the business’s setup and licensing, employees may already have access to collaboration, automation, communication, or security capabilities they aren’t fully using. We’ve covered several ways Microsoft 365 can boost productivity, many of which don’t require adding another platform to the technology stack.
Sometimes the answer isn’t another subscription. Reviewing existing technology may uncover opportunities to simplify a process or eliminate a repetitive task without introducing another platform employees have to learn.
10. Workarounds That Became Permanent Can Slow Down the System
Short-term fixes have a funny way of sticking around. Someone creates a spreadsheet because the regular system can’t handle something. An employee saves documents somewhere else because it’s easier. A manual step gets added to solve a one-time problem. Everybody adapts, and work continues.
Eventually, nobody remembers that the workaround was supposed to be temporary. This may be one of the hardest productivity problems to recognize because employees no longer see it as a problem. It has simply become part of how work gets done.
Start Looking for Friction, Not Fault
If a team seems busy all day but work still isn’t moving as quickly as expected, the answer probably isn’t to tell everyone to work harder. Instead, look at what happens during the workday.
Where do people pause? What do they have to search for? What information gets entered twice? Which technology regularly causes frustration? What processes require more steps than they seem to need? Employees are remarkably good at adapting to inconvenience. That keeps a business moving, but it can also allow inefficiencies to stick around for years.
A fresh look at your technology and workflows can uncover business productivity problems that have become so familiar nobody notices them anymore. Adept Networks IT Services helps businesses in Medford, Oregon, and Spokane, Washington evaluate their technology, address recurring problems, and build an IT environment that supports how their teams actually work.
If your employees are working hard but technology still seems to be getting in their way, contact Adept Networks to start a conversation about where that lost time may be hiding.