Biggest office downtime likely linked to computers
IT WAS the third hour of doing nothing that broke James Scott.
The 25-year-old researcher was sitting at his desk at an insurance firm in northern England when the Internet went down. And with it went access to all of his files, which were sitting on a company server.
“Being without the internet is manageable, just about,” he said. “I’d just work on projects that didn’t require online research. But being unable to access any files for half a day meant I was totally unproductive.”
Scott ended up reading a vaguely work-related book while checking every 10 minutes to see if the company was back online. The three wasted hours? “Infuriating,” he said.
Slow, outdated computers and intermittent internet connections demoralize workers, a survey of 6,000 European workers said. Half of UK employees said creaking computers were “restrictive and limiting,” and 38 per cent said modern technology would make them
Employers don’t realise they are spending thousands of pounds on salaries but – by refusing to update office IT-are wasting money. The stuff employees can probably do in half an hour, they’re sitting for an hour or more because their equipment is too slow. — Mohammad Ali Khan, managing director of Pacific Infotech
more motivated, according to the survey, commissioned by electronics company Sharp.
Scott’s PC runs the relatively up-to-date Windows 8 operating system, but his computer sometimes struggles to handle large spreadsheets and multiple documents open simultaneously, slowing him down.
Others are in a worse spot. One in every eight business laptops and desktops worldwide still run Windows XP, which was introduced in 2001 and abandoned by Microsoft in 2014, according to data collected by Spiceworks, an IT network monitoring firm.
Half of all businesses have at least one PC running the 16-yearold operating system. And in the UK, thousands of computers used by hospitals are still using XP, according to tech website Motherboard.
“Employers don’t realise they are spending thousands of pounds on salaries but-by refusing to update office IT-are wasting money,” said Mohammad Ali Khan, managing director of Pacific Infotech, a Londonbased IT consultancy. “The stuff employees can probably do in half an hour, they’re sitting for an hour or more because their equipment is too slow.” — Bloomberg