Are Your Employees Suffering in Silence?

In my last post, I talked about nagging IT issues that never seem to go away. What I didn’t really dive deeply into, however, is the cost of those issues – not just in dollars and lost time, but in the morale of your employees.

I think we can all agree that dealing with a nagging repetitive issue that interrupts your workflow just plain stinks. We all want to do our job and not have to deal AGAIN with a silly technical issue getting in our way. I think we can also all agree that you could certainly measure the cost of these nagging issues in either dollars or lost time, but have you ever thought about the hit to morale this causes? What if an employee is late picking up their kids because they had to make up time lost from a repetitive issue? What if a salesperson is late getting a proposal out because they couldn’t get their computer to print to the color printer for the 3rd time this week?

I’d like to issue a challenge consisting of two steps. First, conduct a survey of all employees and ask them to list any repetitive issues off the top of their head that interfere with productivity. Next, ask them to keep a log for one week of EVERY issue they have with their technology. For each item on the list, have them place a check mark next to the ones that have happened at least once before.

My bet is that there will be two findings from this little exercise:
1. The number of nagging issues that exist today is higher than what you thought.
2. The number of issues identified from the second part of the exercise will be higher than the number from the first part. That means that your team has had such extensive experience with nagging issues that they have become at least partially numb to them. It also means the cost of these issues is even higher than you thought.

Ask yourself – at what point are you going to stop ‘treating symptoms’ and start FIXING these technology issues once and for all? More importantly – what impact will that have on your business?