For most employees, their productivity hugely depends on the reliability of the tools of trade that they use. In the modern workplace, employees perform their daily tasks using PCs and laptops and as thus, it is critical that these be it pristine condition for them to contribute to productivity. Sadly, this is not always the case. Things can happen and your employees can easily be locked out of their computers making it impossible for them to access their machines and data. Computers and IT systems can fail and cause serious downtime.

How do IT issues affect employee performance?

Computer downtime refers to the lost working time that results from a computer breakdown or issue. Although it is possible for your employees to make up for the lost time, but it is not possible to recover the original time. This means that the original working hours are lost for good.

This also means that the overall level of performance is affected. Computer downtime can lead to missing delivery deadlines which can easily spiral into a feeling of dissatisfaction with co-workers, customers or the employer. Moreover, computer downtime can also affect your employees’ focus and concentration.

How can you prevent computer downtime?

Having seen the effect that computer downtime can have on the productivity of employees, it is essential to find ways to minimize or prevent the causes of computer downtime from ever occurring. Here are some of the causes and how you can avoid them:

Human Error

Human error is one of the leading reasons of computer downtime. This kind of error is a serious threat to business continuity and can happen when an employee accidentally deletes an important file. It can also occur when an employee accesses company database from an unsecured network. It is vital for you to train your employees on IT basics such as how not to access company assets on unsecured systems and how to properly log off from their workstations to prevent accidental deletion of data.

Software Failures

Issues such as unreliable or buggy patches, viruses, and malware intrusions and problems with system upgrades and updates can also cause your computers to hang or shut down abruptly. You need to educate your employees on the need of having your computers updated on a regular basis. This education will help them not to overlook a system alert that calls their attention to a needed update or upgrades. Additionally, this will help the employees become proactive such that when they suspect that a virus or malware have attacked their workstations, they will know the best way to respond.

Hardware Issues

This occurs when there is machine or equipment failure. There are many causes of machine failure, and some may be accidental while some may be due to sabotage. Employees with formal IT education can help your other employees to restore machines which are not beyond repair. Your employees should be sensitized on the importance of regularly backing up the data they are working on to the company’s external or cloud servers. Hardware issues can be costly especially if the organization has no backups.

To sum it up, your employees need to have the following basic IT skills:

• Ability to accurately computers on and off.
• Ability to access company databases through a secure network.
• Ability to seek help from the IT department and escalate IT issues that are beyond their expertise.
• Ability to keep all company data safe and secure and prevent access by unauthorized persons.

A final thought:

Even when you train your employees on basic IT, the day will come when you need advanced technical aid. A Microsoft IT Academy-certified technician can help make sure that your system is secured and reduce events that usually lead to computer downtime.

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