Are Slow Computers Eating Away Your Profits?

The short answer is: Yes! A slow computer insidiously robs a business of time and productivity.

During the normal course of business, computers slow down. As we put additional programs and files onto our PCs, unknowingly download spyware and malware as we surf the net, store temporary files as we use programs, and hard drive fragmentation occurs through normal use, a PC’s performance slowly degrades. Users will notice that their workstations take longer to boot, open programs, or perform searches when looking for files.  While your employees are waiting for their systems to respond, they’re unable to work. If your employees cannot work, you are losing money.

As a business owner, do you know how much it is costing you if an employee’s PC holds them up for just 10 minutes a day? I know what you’re thinking, “it’s only 10 minutes, what is the big deal?” Well, let’s take a closer look at what 10 minutes per day of lost productivity is actually costing your business.

Let’s assume that you pay your employee $25 per hour and that benefits (i.e. health insurance, etc.) cost an additional 20% of the employee’s salary. By the way, some companies, depending on the type of benefits offered, pay as much as 35% to 40% of each employee’s salary. But, we’ll use 20% for this exercise.  Now, let’s do the numbers:

• Assume $25 per hour with benefits @ 20% of pay giving us a total hourly pay of $30.
• $30 per hour/60 minutes = .5 or 50 cents per minute.
• 10 minutes per day @ 50 cents per minute = $5 per day
• $5 per day X 5 days = $25 per week
• $25 per week X 50 weeks (assume 2 weeks’ vacation) = $1,250 in lost productivity per employee per  year

This means that if not maintained, a PC during the course of each day that wastes just 10 minutes booting up, finding files, opening files, etc. will cost a business approximately $1,250 in wasted time per employee each year. Multiply this amount by the number of employees you have and the cost can be very high. For instance, a business with 5 employees can lose as much as $6,250 per year due to slow workstations. I think you’ll agree that there are better uses for $6,000 rather than just throwing it away. As a business owner, how can you fix this?