Seemingly harmless irritants can profoundly affect your bottom line
By Jeff Facer, Owner and CEO, Area-Wide Technologies
Small business decision-makers across every industry are intimately familiar with the productivity-boosting power delivered by cutting-edge technology. Indeed, technologies many of us have come to view as patently routine—such as the ability for employees to store and share documents from a single location or the real-time connectivity and access provided by sophisticated mobile devices such as smart phones—have dramatically improved the productivity of the employees that power our businesses.
What many of us fail to realize, however, is that the convergence of technology and day-to-day operations has produced a number of productivity-sapping pitfalls that can quickly sabotage a company’s efficiency and wreak havoc upon the balance sheets of businesses everywhere. Unfortunately, many of these productivity killers initially appear to be nothing more than the annoying—but ultimately benign—consequences of working with technology on a daily basis, meaning significant damage is often wrought before the threat is even identified.
Consider, for example, our reliance on electronic mail. Most of us likely spend at least 30 minutes a day reading, sorting, and replying to email messages unaware that a significant portion of our time is being squandered to the digital version of junk mail. Unsolicited email, or “spam,” can prove to be more than just a mere nuisance; many such messages, in fact, are sent with malicious intent and may spawn problems that ripple across an entire organization. And when one considers that, according to leading Internet security vendor Symantec, nine out of every 10 email messages sent across the World Wide Web is spam, it’s easy to see how something as seemingly harmless as checking our inboxes each morning can have devastating effects upon the productivity of those we employ.
(A small business with 15 employees, each of whom spends an average of 30 minutes a day sorting and replying to email messages, stands to lose more than 33 hours each week in employee work time to junk email and its associated perils.)
This single example underscores the need for every business to implement measures to prevent the efficiency-destroying aspects of technology from causing irreparable harm where it hurts the most: the bottom line. In the case of spam, a variety of solutions exist—the vast majority of which are remarkably affordable—to effectively block more than 95 percent of unwanted email messages from ever reaching employee inboxes, thereby maintaining the integrity and productivity of your office staff.
Unsolicited junk email, however, is just one example of how the use of essential technology can yield unwanted and potentially catastrophic consequences for businesses of all sizes. Ultimately, every organization must allocate the resources necessary to ensure the technology that, for so many of us, drives business on a daily basis remains a profit-driving asset instead of a colossal consumer of time and productivity.
