Updates Hurting Your Updates: The Unseen Bullet in Productivity’s Back

The Norm

Updates are a necessary part of corporate life. If software becomes outdated, it must be replaced. If the system manufacturer has released a new version, it must be updated. Updates are done for the sake of bettering the tools at the employee’s disposal. Otherwise, we would all still be sitting here using Windows ME while the rest of the world ran Windows 7. Ask your typical employee what they think of when they hear updates and you’ll hear things like “My computer will be faster” or “These glitches will stop appearing”. Yet is that all there is to updates? Is there something behind the scenes that we don’t know about? Something that is hurting us as opposed to helping us?

Untimely Updates: The Double-edged Sword

A recent study done by Embarcadero Technologies shows that 72% of Information Technology workers believe that the constant searches, installations, and waiting for processes to finish drastically hurts their productivity level.  

Unforeseen Productivity Consequences
Cited Here

“Today's workers spend too much time in the antiquated method of acquiring software and installing it on their PCs and maintaining licenses,” Michael Swindell, senior vice president of product management and product marketing at Embarcadero, said. “These methods have to change to keep up with today's technologies. The growing trends of BYOD (Bring Your Own Devices) and the Consumerization of IT are pushing the need for "iTunes-like" app stores more than ever before.”

He’s not far from the truth and you know it. While everyone looks forward to the end result of their updates, they equally dread the take-away time that comes before. The IT people take over your computer and you are stuck twiddling your thumbs until they finish. They take time to find the right update, download it, install it, then realize it’s for the wrong version, and the process starts all over again. All the while, you’re anxiously waiting to finish that project with the impending deadline. By this, the productivity of the IT worker and the cubicle employee diminish; specifically, it diminishes their work time by 67.1 hours, equating to about $2,851 per year, per employee.

The Fork in the Road

So what’s there to do about it? Employers have one of two options: they can either organize these updates before or after hours, in which IT employees would have to remain longer than usual, or they can use this gap in work as a relaxation period for the employee. Now the former does not seem to solve the issue as you are still holding back employees to work overtime and costing the company money. Yet supervisors still choose it over the latter because they rationale that keeping the worker busy. Yet this is the wrong idea. How, you might ask?

Come back on Friday and find out.