Tip of the Week: How to Take the Sting Out of Downtime

Every office worker knows that downtime experienced from a technology issue can totally derail the day’s productivity. However, one thing that office managers might not be aware of is how, in a downtime event, it’s possible to divert a worker’s energy so that productivity still happens on some level.

From a business-time-is-money perspective, downtime can really take a toll on your bottom line, especially if a worker loses all access to his or her files whenever the system goes down. A scenario like this where a worker can find it very difficult to do even a little work may sound a little ridiculous, but it happens more often than you may think.

When employees are unaware of ways they can be productive during downtime, it causes downtime to be twice as expensive for you. Alternatively, if your employees understand the nature of downtime and how costly it is, then any good employee will make extra efforts to stay productive during downtime. You can help instill this always-be-productive attitude in your workers by providing and presenting them with activities they can do in order to stay productive during downtime.

Here are six tasks that you can line your staff up with in order to take the sting out of downtime:

• Use downtime to make needed phone calls.
• Maintain workstations. When downtime hits, a great way to be productive is to take care of small tasks like cleaning that we seem to never have time for, but always need to be done.
• Make sure that your staff has productivity applications available that aren’t dependent upon the Internet. That way, when the Internet connection is lost, they can continue working offline.
• Hold a team meeting and encourage employees to pitch ways to improve their day-to-day operations.
• Downtime is a good time to respond to emails, or at least the messages that you can conjure up from memory. If you have access to an offline word processing program, then you can use it to write a response to the email, and then, when email is once again available, you can open the message, copy, paste, and send what you’ve written during your downtime.
• Even using downtime to jot down productivity ideas on a notepad will help to improve operations--once they’re back online.

While maintaining productivity is an important aspect of minimizing the effects of downtime, a larger issue is making sure that when your network does go down, your company does not lose any data. Downtimes are caused by a variety of issues, and each of them carries the risk of losing valuable company information. Hawaii Tech Support offers the ultimate downtime preventative tool for businesses with our Backup and Disaster Recovery solution. Call us today at (808) 535-9700 to learn more.