Not keeping-up with the times can cost valuable hours, as a recent international report has indicated. Surveying office professionals across multiple countries, the research undertaken by tech manufacturer Sharp, indicates that the average office worker wastes at least 21 days each year due to slow or inefficient technology, longer than some countries allow for annual paid annual leave.
The biggest time drain reported was searching for files on a server – 23 minutes per day – thanks to poor search tools. Other routine time wasters include using the printer: seven minutes spent daily waiting for it to warm up, and nearly ten minutes waiting for pages to come out.
The surveying of the 1000 respondents in the UK alone found that this adds up to almost 40 minutes wasted per employee per day, the equivalent of 167 hours or four weeks of dead time every year.
Almost 80% of respondents said that their workplace is out of date when it comes to technology. If their office had better technology, nearly two-thirds of workers (64%) said they would be more productive, and nearly one in five (19%) said they would stop looking for another job, suggesting a big opportunity for businesses to improve both output and staff retention.
