The true costs incurred by businesses for technology downtime

Technology downtime is becoming a huge issue. IT challenges and poor digital work experiences are costing businesses tens of millions of dollars in lost work time and that the problem is much bigger than IT leaders realize, Nexthink finds.

With employees saying that only just over half of workplace technology issues they experience are actually reported to IT, the IT department does not have visibility of the problems that exist in their organizations. For a company with 10,000 employees, this could equate to nearly half a million dollars per week and $25 million per year.

Employees wasting time on IT-related issues

The research, conducted by Vanson Bourne, which surveyed 1,000 senior IT decision-makers and 2,000 end users at organizations with at least 1,500 employees across the U.S., the U.K., France, and Germany, shows that employees are losing an average of 28 minutes every time they have an IT-related problem. The report also shows that IT decision makers believe employees are experiencing approximately two IT issues per week, wasting nearly 50 hours a year.

However, as only just over half of IT issues are being reported, the numbers are more likely to be nearly double that – close to 100 hours (two work weeks) a year. This has led to a vicious cycle of employees trying to fix IT problems on their own, leading to less engagement with the IT department, which doesn’t have visibility into how the technology is being consumed.

A major disconnect between IT departments and employees

There exists a major disconnect between IT departments and employees, with 84% of employees believing that their organizations should be doing more to improve the digital experience at work. However, a staggering 90% of IT leaders believe that workers are satisfied with technology in the workplace, highlighting the discrepancy between perception and reality of the digital employee experience.

Ironically, innovative IT leaders are exacerbating the problem by introducing new technologies and digital transformation projects without having visibility into the success of these projects. These new technologies negatively impact employees’ digital experiences because IT cannot measure how the change is impacting their day-to-day work.

Technology downtime: Other takeaways and findings

• When IT issues go unnoticed, things get worse: 79% of respondents agree that when IT issues are not reported, it always leads to bigger issues
• Digital employee experience is highly important across organizations: 82% view it as ‘very important’ to ‘critical’
• Inability to measure new IT rollouts: On average, IT departments only have approximately 56% visibility into the success of new technology roll outs, 58% visibility into adoption of the roll out, and 45% visibility into the issues impacting employees’ experiences
• IT issues at work are commonplace: 61% of respondents agree that IT downtime is an accepted norm in their organizations

“A significant amount of downtime per employee is a reality for many organizations but IT teams don’t have visibility of the poor digital experiences that employees have to put up with,” said Jon Cairns, VP of Global Solution Consulting at Nexthink.

“Every day, employees settle for small IT glitches – slow boot-up times, patchy internet connectivity, programs crashing, etc., but these problems go unreported, unnoticed and amount to more wasted time than we’d like to admit. Combined, all of this hurts productivity, morale, organizational culture, employee retention and ultimately the top and bottom line for millions of businesses. Add in the fact that so many of us are all working remotely during the current crisis and the problem may be much bigger than the research shows.”