How do you value your time? How about your team’s? If you don’t value time, no need to read further.
But chances are, you’re of the worldview that time is your most valuable human commodity. And time is a one-way street–once it’s gone, it’s gone! Yet still, the age-old truth, that time gets away from us, continues to plague workplace productivity. Hubspot reports that only about 60% of work time is actually spent productively with an average of eight hours wasted each week per employee. Yikes.
Sure, some downtime is inevitable. And some breaks may actually boost productivity when it’s time to get to business, so don’t feel guilty every single time you steal a few minutes to stretch your legs and grab a cup of coffee–you’ll likely make up for the time in increased focus and energy.
But there’s another side to the time-wasting conundrum. Taking a few minutes for yourself in the middle of your otherwise chaotic day is a hugely different scenario than taking time away from productive hours to screw around with technology issues. How about an even worse scenario: taking time away from your productive hours to fix someone else’s technology issues. Woof.
Technology as a force multiplier isn’t a new idea, but when leveraged incorrectly, can easily be considered a force divider. Think about the amount of time wasted when your Director of Operations rolls up their sleeves and attempts to troubleshoot a team members IT issue. What happens next is as follows:
- Director wastes 30-minutes working on something they shouldn’t be
- Teammate wastes 30-minutes waiting for the Director to realize they should have called IT
- After you finally call IT, they have to fix whatever it is your Director did, and then solvethe original problem, figure another 30-minutes of wasted time.
This all assumes your IT support team has the ability to actually fix the technology issue in a timely, effective, and professional manner. Seems like that should be pretty basic, right? Unfortunately, for many companies, it’s not the norm. Real bummer.
Whether you have an internal IT team or leverage an MSP for your business’ technology management, technology’s primary function should be to act as an enabler for the rest of the business. There will always be bumps in the road, but how you choose to manage those bumps is key.
If you’re still letting your Accountant handle most of your IT issues because they took a typing class in third grade, just stop. If you’re pushing things to your IT team but seemingly obvious IT issues turn into complete time-sucks, with half the office standing around waiting to get back online, stop that too.
It’s probably time for your business to start thinking about alternatives.
Stay tuned for Part 2…