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Tue, May 19, 2009 14:37 EDT

6 Drains on Worker Productivity (and Company $$$)

Topic: Enterprise Management

Current Rating: 4 Comments: 6

Queue the Benny Hill music: CIO.com reports that in a recent study, researchers found that employees at large companies (10,000+ workers) spend an average of 38 minutes searching for one document, whether it's on company networks, databases, intranets or local drives.

What a frightening, unnecessary drain on productivity.

Below are five more snags that can tie up employees for hours. With a little basic upfront training, plus assistance from a support desk, these issues could be solved in minutes.

1. Outlook - offline: Networks sometimes hiccup and bump users offline. It's usually so quick that employees do not notice and are reconnected. Still, the reconnection can fail. We've seen people go an entire day without being able to figure it out on their own. If it's a result of an interrupted connection, reconnecting is just a matter of deselecting the "work offline" item in the File menu, or a reboot.

2. Outlook - mailbox full: When a mailbox reaches its limit, Outlook yanks the ability to send e-mails. The next to go is receiving messages. E-mails are held hostage in the Outbox, and the user is tied to his computer until he frees up enough space. Instead of cleaning up a mailbox message by message (which is a common approach and quite tedious), he can organize his mail by size and move large mail to a Personal Folders File (.pst). Once he's caught up, he can set up auto-archiving to prevent future mailbox clogs. A few steps compared to a few hundred.

3. Word - document closed without saving: CTRL+S is the most valuable keyboard shortcut anyone can learn. Left pinky and left ring finger (or left pinky and left middle finger, depending on the size of your hands). Repeat often. It will save your employees hours of retyping and begging IT to trashpick temp folders looking for a document that doesn't exist.

4. Excel - dragging a formula to paste it to thousands of rows: What does an employee do when she has a formula that she needs to copy and paste to 14,000 adjacent rows? If she is like the majority of Excel users, she will grab the bottom right corner of the cell, and drag it down to row 14,000. She'd be better off double-clicking the fill handle (the little black square in the bottom right of the selected cell). When she sees how much time she saves, she'll be thrilled.

5. Windows - meandering through six levels to reach a folder used every day: Say, for example, an employee's files are stored on the Z drive. Within that drive is a folder for his department. Within that department folder is a folder for this fiscal year. Within that is a folder for a specific project. And on and on. He takes this scenic route three to five times a day. If he created a shortcut, he could make the trip in one click.

FIND MORE INFO IN: "How Not to Sabotage Your Whopping Software Investment" | Desktop Application Support | BlackBerry + Mobile Support | PC Helps eTraining | Contact PC Helps

You do not have flash or javascript support.
Average (2 votes)
4
 
 
Tue, May 19, 2009 18:17 EDT
Posted by: William Freedman
Rating: 10

Considering how cheap disk space is right now, why do we ever get "mailbox full" notices? I can see getting a warning saying, "Bad, bad you! You're only supposed to have at most 250 megs, but you're up to 275. Could you please take a moment to delete anything big you don't really need on the mail server?" But I don't get why anyone would actually care until you've gotton over a gig and stayed that way for at least a couple weeks.

And as for Excel tips and tricks -- we could do one a day if you wanted.

Keep posting!

Bill Freedman
bfree@us.ibm.com

http://advice.cio.com/william_freedman/sticker_shock_can_we_work_together_to_avoid_it .

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." -- Einstein

 
Wed, May 20, 2009 10:02 EDT
Anonymous user
Posted by: Ananth
Rating: 90

Where is the 6 point on productivity drains. The article only has 5. Is reading this post the sixth. :)

 
Wed, May 20, 2009 11:47 EDT
Anonymous user
Posted by: Anonymous
Rating: 90

lol... # 7 reading your post and mine

 
Wed, May 20, 2009 12:29 EDT
Anonymous user
Posted by: CyberSamuri
Rating: 90

The 6th one is gettin hooked into reading an article which only states the obvious instead of being truly enlightening.

 
Wed, May 20, 2009 11:57 EDT
Anonymous user
Posted by: Consulting CIO
Rating: 10

Bad idea to have users archive emails to .pst files...

These are stored locally on the client PC. One hard drive failure and those mission critical emails are gone for good.

Better practice - allow users to store unlimited on Exchange; set policies to have them review regularly. And when their store size becomes unwieldy (around 10GB) archive that, but store (unlinked to prevent corruption) on a server share somewhere safe and sound where it gets backed up regularly...

Email is too critical to have on local drives...

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