How much IT downtime do your employees have in your Liverpool office space? These are the moments when a computer won’t perform a task or a programme stops responding that leaves us sat helpless at our desks waiting for the problem to work itself out, or for IT help to come and save the day.
Depending on your own experience, this could be a rare occurrence or something that happens all too often, but regardless, it really does end up costing you a lot of time and productivity.
A new study has found that this ‘productivity black hole’ that comes with workplace IT issues costs the economy as much as £4 billion every year, according to the Enterprise Times. It found that, on average, workers lose 1.2 hours every month to IT problems, but despite 95 per cent saying that they’ve experienced them, only 65 per cent have called IT to help try to stop it from happening.
Joe Hemming, from Capita IT Services, which commissioned the research, said that putting a value against this lost time should encourage workplaces to up their game when it comes to resolving IT issues: “Organisations cannot expect workforce to be productive without providing them with IT experience they need to do their job effectively,” he explains.
With this, he says that workplaces need to tackle the problem from a few angles. First up, arm employees with the tech skills to deal with certain recurring issues. The level of IT support needs to not only be upped, but addressed in terms of asking for better feedback from employees on how tech is impacting their role.