Slow Network Speeds Cause More Than High Blood Pressure

Productivity loss isn’t just a nuisance; it can be converted into an actual dollar figure coming right off your bottom line.

Your team may be sitting in front of their computers grumbling about the slow network speeds and calling it a “technology issue,” but the truth is that it’s really a business issue. It impacts productivity, and lower productivity hits your bottom line.

Speaking of the bottom line, you’re moving away from it with every “issue” that gets excused as a technical obstacle that people will have to live with, instead of dealing with it as a direct hit on your profit margin.

Here are some technical issues that may be stealing productivity from your company

Basic physical IT resource maintenance
Go for the Big Stuff, first
Take mobile devices as seriously as servers

Basic physical IT resource maintenance

You buy computers. The IT department sets them up. You push them out to your employees. All’s well that ends well, right? Wrong.

When was the last time you did an audit to determine the physical condition of your company’s IT equipment? Outdated or malfunctioning equipment is a hit on productivity. The capital expense of replacing it is even worse. What’s the solution?

Consider partnering with an IT services organization that can maintain your equipment or even move you to virtual systems. An outside service brings the economy of scale to you, making things affordable while still allowing you to retain IT oversight in-house if you wish. Work with your finance department to create a business case, and see if this is a money-saver for your organization.

Go for the Big Stuff, first

There are a million variations of this technical issues fable. Your IT department spends weeks working on a problem with a minor plugin. They finally fix it, only to discover that it does nothing to solve network slowness. The problem was much bigger.

Minor issues often squeak the loudest, but sometimes it’s best to ignore them. Instead, approach it from a business standpoint. Which resolved technical issue will give you the biggest return on your investment of time and money? This is often easier to do by bringing in an outside service that can audit things with an objective eye. You may be too close to the problem to see it for what it is.

Take mobile devices as seriously as servers 

You’re only as strong as your weakest link. In the case of IT, that weak link might actually be the BYOD collection of smartphones, tablets, and laptops, your employees are connecting to your network.

Better device security has gotten us past the walled garden necessity that many IT departments impose on companies. Today, most companies allow their employees to use personal electronic devices on business networks—for the obvious benefit that these devices are productivity tools.

However, any tool can be misused. Or worse yet, lost. Whether you do it in-house or form a partnership with an external IT services firm, you owe it to your bottom line to incorporate encryption requirements into both your policies and the BYOD equipment connecting to your network. Don’t just assume that people are following the requirements. Take the extra step of including safety measures like remote wipe capabilities for mobile devices and laptops.

Whether you own the mobile device or it belongs to your employee who uses it as a productivity tool, company information that falls into the wrong hands when a smartphone gets lost can have a massive impact on your bottom line.