Ask a business owner what their biggest expense is and there’s a good chance the answer will be people.
Salaries.
National Insurance.
Pensions.
Training.
Recruitment.
Businesses invest a great deal of money in finding good employees and helping them perform well.
Then we sometimes give those employees a five-year-old laptop that takes three minutes to start.
A Wi-Fi connection that drops out twice a day.
Software that freezes.
A printer everyone knows has to be restarted before it’ll work.
And an IT problem that has been happening since February but nobody has quite got around to fixing.
There’s an interesting contradiction here.
Businesses work hard to make their employees productive, while sometimes overlooking the technology those employees use for seven or eight hours every day.
Ten minutes doesn’t sound like much
Imagine an employee loses ten minutes each day because of technology.
Perhaps their computer is slow. They have to restart Outlook. A spreadsheet takes ages to open. They lose connection to a shared drive. Teams decides their headset doesn’t exist again.
Nothing catastrophic happens. Nobody declares an IT emergency.
It’s just ten frustrating minutes.
Across approximately 220 working days, however, ten minutes per day becomes roughly:
37 hours.
That’s almost an entire working week lost by one employee.
Now multiply it across 30 employees.
Around 1,100 hours.
That’s a lot of time to lose to problems that individually seemed too insignificant to worry about.
Small IT problems are particularly good at hiding
A server failure gets attention.
A ransomware attack definitely gets attention.
A company-wide internet outage gets attention.
But a computer taking 45 seconds longer than it should to perform a routine task?
Probably not.
An employee might simply accept it.
The same is true of:
- unreliable Wi-Fi;
- slow applications;
- repeated password problems;
- awkward file access;
- poor remote-working setups;
- old monitors;
- unreliable printers;
- unnecessarily manual processes;
- recurring software errors.
People adapt.
They learn that the finance system takes a while. They know which meeting room doesn’t connect properly. They restart the computer before an important Teams call. They save a document locally because accessing the shared folder is too slow.
Eventually, the workaround becomes normal.
That’s when poor technology becomes expensive without looking expensive.
What does one hour of employee time actually cost?
Salary isn’t the full cost of employing somebody.
There are employer National Insurance contributions, pension contributions, benefits, equipment, office costs and other overheads.
But let’s keep the example deliberately simple.
Suppose an employee’s time costs the business £25 per hour.
If poor technology wastes 37 hours of their time during the year, that’s:
£925 of employee time.
For one person.
If a newer computer would have eliminated most of that lost time, keeping the old machine might not have saved the business any money at all.
It simply moved the cost somewhere less visible.
Now multiply everything by 40
This is where IT changes as companies grow.
A minor inefficiency in a three-person company affects three people.
The same inefficiency in a 40-person company can affect 40.
Suppose a recurring technology problem wastes only five minutes per employee each day.
With 40 employees, that’s:
200 minutes every working day.
More than three hours.
Across a year, that’s roughly 730 hours of employee time.
At our illustrative £25-per-hour employment cost, that’s more than:
£18,000.
From five minutes.
This doesn’t mean every five-minute delay can magically be eliminated.
It means that at scale, small improvements become valuable.
The cheapest technology isn’t always the cheapest option
Imagine you’re buying 20 laptops.
Option A costs £600 each.
Option B costs £900 each.
The difference is £6,000.
It’s tempting to conclude that Option A saves the company £6,000.
Perhaps it does.
But that’s not the only calculation worth making.
Those computers might be used for four years.
If the better machine saves its user just a few minutes each working day because applications open faster, multitasking is smoother and the device remains capable for longer, the productivity difference can potentially outweigh the purchase-price difference.
That’s before considering reliability, warranty, battery life or the employee experience.
Business technology should therefore be assessed on total value, not simply purchase price.
Your £50,000 employee is waiting for a £700 computer
This is one of the stranger false economies in business IT.
A company might employ somebody whose time is extremely valuable.
Perhaps they’re an engineer. An estimator. A solicitor. An accountant. A designer. A salesperson. A senior manager.
Their work generates or protects significant value for the company.
Yet they’re spending parts of every day waiting for an ageing computer because replacing it seems expensive.
Put differently:
The business is protecting the cost of the computer at the expense of the person using it.
Sometimes that’s the wrong side of the equation.
Technology can also remove work completely
Good IT isn’t only about making computers faster.
The bigger opportunity can be removing unnecessary work.
Think about tasks employees perform repeatedly:
- Copying information between systems.
- Manually creating the same document.
- Chasing approvals.
- Searching through email for information.
- Entering data from forms.
- Producing routine reports.
- Sending standard communications.
- Creating user accounts.
- Moving files.
- Updating spreadsheets.
Some of these tasks may be candidates for automation.
Even a small improvement can be significant when a process happens hundreds or thousands of times per year.
Ask:
“Why do we do this manually?”
Sometimes the answer will be:
“Because a human genuinely needs to.”
That’s fine.
But occasionally the answer is:
“Because that’s how we’ve always done it.”
That’s worth investigating.
Microsoft 365 is more than email and Word
This is another area where businesses can leave value unused.
Many organisations think of Microsoft 365 primarily as:
Outlook.
Word.
Excel.
Teams.
OneDrive.
Those are important tools, but modern Microsoft 365 environments can potentially support much more around collaboration, device management, security, workflow and information sharing depending on the licences and services being used.
The question isn’t whether your company owns lots of technology.
It’s:
Are your employees getting useful value from the technology you’re already paying for?
Buying software nobody uses isn’t digital transformation.
The employee experience matters too
There’s another cost that’s difficult to put into a spreadsheet.
Frustration.
Imagine starting every working day with a computer you dislike using.
It’s slow. The battery is poor. You can’t find the files you need. The VPN disconnects. The printer is unreliable. You regularly have to work around technical problems.
None of those things alone will necessarily make somebody resign.
But they contribute to how an employee experiences their working day.
Compare that with technology that simply works.
They turn on the laptop. It starts quickly. They can access what they need. They can work from the office or remotely. They can join a meeting. If something does go wrong, they know exactly how to get help.
Technology disappears into the background.
That’s usually a sign that it’s doing its job.
Support speed affects productivity
Good technology still goes wrong.
The next question is what happens when it does.
Suppose an employee can’t work properly because of an IT problem.
They contact their IT provider.
Then wait. And wait.
Eventually somebody responds.
By then, perhaps two hours have passed.
The technical problem might take only 15 minutes to resolve.
But the business impact wasn’t 15 minutes.
It was two hours and 15 minutes.
That’s why response time matters so much in managed IT.
The purpose of support isn’t simply to close tickets.
It’s to return employees to productive work.
Recurring problems deserve more attention
Here’s another useful distinction.
Fixing an employee’s Outlook problem is good.
Fixing the same employee’s Outlook problem every Thursday for six months isn’t.
A managed IT provider should be looking for patterns.
Why does the problem keep returning?
Is the device unhealthy? Is there a configuration issue? Is storage running low? Is there an application conflict? Does something need replacing?
The objective should be to remove recurring friction, not build an impressive collection of closed tickets.
IT problems don’t always get reported
This is particularly important for managers.
Don’t assume that because your IT helpdesk receives few tickets, employees have few technology problems.
People don’t report everything.
Sometimes because they’ve found a workaround. Sometimes because the problem isn’t bad enough. Sometimes because they’re busy.
And sometimes because:
“It’s always been like that.”
One useful exercise is simply to ask employees:
“What is the most annoying thing about the technology you use at work?”
You may receive some very useful answers.
If five people independently mention the same issue, you’ve probably found something worth fixing.
Measure technology by the business outcome
A director doesn’t necessarily need to know how much RAM a computer has.
They need to know whether employees can do their jobs efficiently.
They don’t need to understand every Microsoft 365 administration feature.
They need people to be able to collaborate securely.
They don’t need to understand the technical architecture of the company Wi-Fi.
They need reliable connectivity.
They don’t need to understand the mechanics of endpoint monitoring.
They need computers that are secure, maintained and working.
Technology should ultimately be measured by outcomes.
- Can our people work effectively?
- Can they get help quickly?
- Are recurring problems being eliminated?
- Is our information protected?
- Can employees work securely from where they need to?
- Are we getting value from what we’re paying for?
Those are management questions.
Ask your IT company about productivity
Most conversations with IT providers begin when something has gone wrong.
Try having a different conversation.
Ask:
“Where do you think technology is wasting our employees’ time?”
That’s an interesting question.
Then ask:
“What would you improve if this were your business?”
A provider that understands your organisation should have ideas.
Perhaps it’s replacing six old computers. Improving Wi-Fi. Changing how files are accessed. Removing an unreliable application. Automating a process. Improving remote working. Providing employee training. Or simply fixing three recurring problems everybody has learned to tolerate.
Not every improvement needs to be expensive.
Create a technology friction list
Here’s a simple exercise for your next management meeting.
Ask everybody to identify technology that regularly frustrates them.
Don’t debate the solutions yet.
Just create the list.
For each issue, estimate:
- How many employees does it affect?
- How frequently does it happen?
- Roughly how much time does it waste?
Then multiply those numbers.
You may discover that something everybody regarded as a minor annoyance is actually consuming hundreds of hours per year.
Those are the problems worth prioritising.
The best IT can be almost invisible
There’s a reason good IT sometimes struggles to demonstrate its value.
When it’s working properly, very little happens.
Employees log in. Email arrives. Files open. Meetings connect. Applications work. Security threats are stopped. Backups complete. Updates install. People get help when they need it.
The working day continues.
Nobody walks into the Managing Director’s office to announce:
“Great news! Everything worked again today.”
But that’s exactly the outcome the business is paying for.
Technology enables almost every employee to do their job.
And when it’s properly selected, maintained, secured and supported, it can quietly improve the productivity of the entire organisation.
Your most productive employee might not be an employee
A good employee makes themselves productive.
Good technology can make every employee more productive.
That’s why technology shouldn’t be viewed simply as an overhead to minimise.
Nor should businesses spend money on technology simply because something new exists.
The objective is to invest where technology can:
- save employee time;
- remove frustration;
- improve customer service;
- reduce repetitive work;
- enable collaboration;
- reduce downtime;
- improve security;
- help people do better work.
For a 25–50 person organisation, small improvements multiplied across an entire workforce can become surprisingly valuable.
Where is technology costing your employees time?
Bitwise-IT provides managed IT and cybersecurity services to businesses across Essex and beyond.
Our aim isn’t simply to fix computers when they break.
It’s to help businesses create a technology environment where employees can get on with their jobs, problems are dealt with quickly and recurring frustrations don’t simply become accepted as normal.
If you’re responsible for IT and suspect your employees are spending too much time fighting with technology, we’re happy to have a conversation.
Because the purpose of business technology isn’t to give your employees more IT to deal with.
It’s to help them get more work done.
