You should want your team to be ready and able to accomplish as much as possible. So, when a team member approaches you with a request for a better laptop or a dual-monitor setup and the wish to do more with their time, you should agree. However, there may be that little voice in the back of your head, whispering, “Was that a wise investment?”
It can be hard to balance the need for employee satisfaction with your budgetary restrictions, but it must be done. Let’s go over the considerations you need to make… as well as the pitfalls that must be avoided.
Your Existing Technology May Be Holding You Back More Than You’d Think
Whether your employees are requesting new or additional technology or not, you must maintain your technology over time, upgrading it as necessary. Exactly why it is so vital becomes clear with a few simple calculations.
Let’s assume that an older computer burns through an extra five minutes of the user’s time every day, just because of slow loading times, restarts, and laggy boot times. That’s obviously frustrating, but it only gets worse when you start looking at it on a macro scale.
If an employee works about 250 days each year and loses five minutes each day, they lose 1,250 minutes each year. This equals 20.8 hours, half of a work week. If this impacts your whole team, that’s suddenly months down the drain.
So, ensuring that your team has the technology that reliably works really does make a difference.
The benefits don’t stop there, either—back in the 1920s, studies indicated that productivity could be measurably boosted if workers felt their needs were being noticed and met. Essentially, the study demonstrated that prioritizing the well-being of a workforce was sufficient to motivate that workforce to perform more effectively. This means that simply providing your team with new equipment can help boost productivity.
How Modern Productivity Can Be Measured
There are a few key signs that your productivity has improved, if you know where to look. Here are some places to get you started:
- Support tickets - The number of support tickets that come in for specific issues can indicate if productivity-sapping problems have been solved. For instance, if you’ve suddenly received far fewer tickets concerning Internet connectivity issues after you’ve updated your router, you’ve improved productivity by taking away a problem.
- Task time - If a task took 25 minutes to complete, and it suddenly takes 12 minutes after new tech has been introduced, that’s an opportunity to consider how your productivity has been improved.
- Employee feedback - Simply ask your team members if they’ve noticed anything changing after you’ve made improvements.
We Can Help You Manage Your Hardware!
Instead of having to make the decision when the duress of a desktop conking out or a server’s hum fading into silence is adding pressure, why not plan for it ahead of time so the panic doesn’t have to set in? Techworks Consulting, Inc. will be there to help you design a predictable schedule to refresh your hardware, allowing for more effective budgeting and standardized IT across your business.
We’re dedicated to helping businesses invest in the correct tools for their needs and ensure that their teams are able to maximize what these tools can do. Let us help you next.
Give us a call at (631) 285-1527 to get started.
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