Businesses lose revenue when their IT servers are down. Two other factors that decrease your billable hours are an unproductive workforce and work that must be redone. Here we provide some tips to reduce losses in these areas.
Reduce IT Downtime
In the UK, 2018 saw companies lose 60 million hours in downtime. For the same number of hours, employees could not be productive. By reducing downtime, you eliminate an excuse for employees not meeting their targets.
You should monitor IT infrastructure regularly and maintain connectivity by doing system updates as soon as they are released. These fixes also close the gap on vulnerabilities that could make your company a target for malware and be held hostage by ransomware.
An effective IT department will maximise the time your company is up and running and ensure that staff can be productively engaged on your business systems. Your network needs to enable employees to work round the clock, from the office, home, or anywhere else. Downtime has a negative effect on revenue earned.
You could also consider outsourcing this function to experts to ensure maximum available working hours. Totality Services is an IT company London. It has been rated one of the top IT support London companies and provides end-to-end customer-tailored services throughout the UK. Their cloud-based solutions enable businesses to conduct their work 24/7 at any geographical location.
An Unproductive Workforce
An unproductive workforce will result in poor company performance over the long term. Customers will choose to do business with a firm that delivers quality goods and services on time. Your competitors will see an opportunity to benefit and gain the customers you lose.
Some of the causes of poor productivity reside in management more than employees. Multitasking has been deemed counterproductive by researchers and was found to decrease productivity by 40%. It often occurs when scheduled work is set aside for special projects, resulting in missed deadlines. Managers should allocate tasks in accordance with KPIs and not distract an employee who is productively engaged in a necessary function with new work.
Establish how much time is spent using digital work tools for communication. These can result in continuous interruptions and were shown to take up six out of eight hours every workday. Get staff to set aside time for answering emails and not to respond to each message as it comes in.
Three-quarters of managers rarely supervise their employees. Taking the time to check that staff are on point and productive is essential to reducing time wasted.
Redoing Work
Job clarity is important if you want to prevent duplications. Over half the employees in one study were duplicating work without realising it with a consequent loss of productive time of 15%. Employees should be clear on what their functions are and how these fit into the chain. The three types of clarity needed by employees are role, task, and goal clarity.
Paying attention to company culture and developing a climate of collaboration results in employees knowing who does what and how all the pieces fit together. This makes it less likely that work will be duplicated. Streamlining processes removes overlaps in functions.
Poor quality work can result in products not passing quality control and having to be redone. This is a waste of time and material. Use an effective quality management system to identify problems and reskill teams.
These tips will reduce unproductive time. The results will be seen in your bottom line.
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