Our team’s workstations aren’t often the first thing that comes to mind when we think about IT. However, they could be among the most crucial tools in your IT toolbox. Your firm will surely suffer if your team’s workspaces are old and unclean.
Maintaining a cycle of preventative maintenance for each employee’s workplace is crucial. You may do this to continue being effective and relevant in terms of technology.
Let’s look at the three essential elements to keep in mind while updating the workstations for your staff.
Price and effectiveness
For your organization to work well, you must make sure that every component is both affordable and efficient. However, it’s easy to get into the futile loop of attempting to save money by continuing to use an outdated workstation that’s five years old. This may seem to be the ideal option for now, but in reality, the workstation will eventually malfunction, costing you time and money to ship for repairs while also leaving the employee in a shutdown state without access to their data and resources.
On desktops, it is advised to have a healthy 3-5 year replacement cycle. Your company will be able to maintain a healthy fleet, which will eventually result in cost savings, by investing in proactive and routine workstation replacement and refresh. For instance, that workstation, which is five years old, is ill-equipped to manage the workload of a newer one. All of the daily-used business programs are upgraded over time, increasing their resource requirements. The time it takes to load and operate the apps your employees need to do their jobs will increase if that machine is not kept up to date. This results in lost time for the user and lost revenue for the company.
This lost time accumulates. An old computer could start up a little slower than it used to. It could have had modest age-related problems that resulted in time-wasting mistakes. As a result, a typical employee paying $16 per hour must deal with those kinds of problems for around 15 minutes each day. That works out to around a $2,000 loss for the company over the course of two years. Only the worker’s wage is taken into consideration in this computation; potential lost productivity is not. A new computer may be bought for more than $2,000, however.
Some companies believe that holding off on replacing computers until they are malfunctioning or have fully failed is the best way to squeeze every last dollar out of a costly piece of equipment. In actuality, this happens often, and the company is left with a worker who is unable to complete their task until their replacement comes, which might take days or weeks! The total cost may be quite high for the company.
Employee contentment
The success of your company and of your workers depends critically on showing that you appreciate each employee’s time and efforts. Employee satisfaction is increased along with worker efficiency and production when the workstation fleet is kept in good condition. Today’s workforce need access to the proper tools for the task. They don’t have time to spend on dealing with broken, outdated equipment.
Dealing with IT issues may result in wasted time, missed deadlines, lost work, and other hassles. It might result in general work unhappiness if your staff members often deal with IT problems that are inconvenient and annoying as a result of outdated and defective technology. That can act as the impetus for them to look for a new job.
Attracting and retaining great individuals is harder than ever in today’s competitive labor market. To succeed at their roles, you must provide your staff with the greatest tools available. This demonstrates how much you respect and cherish the job they accomplish.
Reaction vs proactive action
It’s often simpler to say than to do to be proactive. The physical characteristics of your workplace and workstations are one of the areas in organizations that are sometimes overlooked or pushed to the bottom of the list for preventative maintenance. These crucial features of computers, phones, printers, and other devices are often disregarded, or only temporary solutions are applied in an effort to “save time.” However, if we set aside the time to plan ahead for our physical IT requirements, we can save our company a tremendous amount of time and money.
Final thoughts
Reactively replacing computers when they malfunction is more difficult and disruptive than maintaining a healthy, proactive refresh cycle. Reactively managing workstation replacements necessitates more engagement from the impacted users and the company leadership since a strategy must be created each time on the spot. A company such as Everett IT Solutions problem can almost always be avoided rather than having to deal with the fallout afterwards.