The High Cost of Poor Skills: 2
Training Strategies
by Bob Kesselman 4/1/2009
How weak are your employee's computer skills, and how much does it cost you?
A 2001 CapGemini (formerly Ernst & Young) study reported that office workers waste an average of 2:51
hours per week (140 hours/year, 6% of their work day) creating work-arounds necessitated by a lack of basic computing skills. Assuming a $50K salary package for the average administrative worker in 2009, inadequate computer skills cost employers $3,555 per employee per year.
This and similar studies serve as impetus for employee training, yet few professional offices offer basic computer
skills training to their employees. The argument we most often hear is that the workforce is far more computer savvy-today
than it was in 2001, making basic skills training less necessary. Current data suggests otherwise.
Studies continue to show that basic skills training - typically Windows, Word and Excel instruction - increase worker productivity by 3-7%.
It may be that todays computer-savvy users have substantial skills for manipluating music, pictures and videos, but their basic office computing skills still need work.
Skills training is never bad. The explosion of on-line skills training courses makes training cheaper and more accessible than ever.
Whether skills training is appropriate for your office depends on the the mix of
More troubling still are current studies that show people continue to spend 4-7% of thier work time troubleshooting printer issues, backup creation tasks, automated task scheduling, monitor and power settings, simple eMail, browser & download problems, slow machines, security issues, telephone, voice mail and virus issues.
Most technical professionals will tell you that skills training solves most efficiency problems. They'll also tell you that
it's cheaper to train your employeers than to suffer productivity losses (true); that most organizations don't train (true again); that thosw who do cut their training budgets at the first sign of tight money (also true).
In fact, both sets of numbers are probably true. While skills training might make people better, faster and more accurate at some tasks, work stopages and other challenges continue to rob them of productivity on others. It's scary to think that trained employees can increase their productivity by as much as 8% and still lose up to 3 hours per weak on computing issues, but that's what the numbers suggest.
Poor Skills and Ignorance Are Not The Same Things: Two Stories
Antivirus Tuesday
In September 2008, we conducted a two day site audit for a professional office with 24 employees. We noticed that 15 of 24 PCs were slow enough to be useless for simple tasks.
After some exploration, we learned that Norton Antivirus ran every Tuesday morning on all of the office's computers, and that it virtually stopped work on our 15 problem PCs. The productivty cost? About $2,400 per week.
The problem wasn't with Norton antivirus, nor was it with the users. As it turns out, our client's tech support contractor instructed users to leave their PCs on everynight but log out for security. The contractor scheduled each PC's antivirus software to perform a full virus scan every Monday night at 10:00pm. Norton Antivirus will not run unless and until a user logs in. By default, each computer delayed execution of the virus scan until the next login - Tuesday morning. Still, there should have been no problem: most PCs will run Norton Antivirus in the background as the users work on other tasks, but these PCs would not because they were old and underpowered. A $35 memory upgrade made provided sufficient aditional computing power to run Norton in background while users went about their business.
My Free Computers
My friend works for a major local entity with several thousand employees. Her employer provides secure remote access that allows employees to dial in to their work computers form home. Of course, she can't remote in to her computer unless she leaves it on at night, so she developed the habit of checking the power everynight on her way out the door.
One night several years ago, my friend and a co-worker could not connect to their computers from home. When they got to work the next day, they found that their computers had been turned off. That night they made doubly sure to leave the power on, but could not connect again. The problem persisted for days. Eventually, tech support examined their computers and explained that short circuits were shutting PCs down every night.
Over several days, tech support replaced different parts on both computers up to and finally including the the motherboards. The computers continued to shut themselves down. Finally tech support suggested that the computers were shot and recommended replacements. My friend's boss ordered 4 new computers at at total cost of $6,000. When tech support replace the old computers my friend asked if she could keep two. She brought them to me. Both computers now operate perfectly and are still in use. In fact, I'm writing this article on one running our MajicJacks. It took less than five minutes to fix both PCs.
There was nothing phsically wrong with either computer. Windows XP has a power setting feature that will turn a computer off either at a certain time every day or after a certain amount of idle time. Someone changed the setting on these machines during scheduled maintenance and did not tell the the users. The next tech missed it, initiating a set of activities that cost the company about $8,000.
If Skills Training Can't Stop This Kind Of Waste, What Can?
