Five ways to make your workers more efficient.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics had two big announcements last week: The nation’s productivity rose at an annual rate of 6.6 percent from April through June of this year, and labor costs fell by 5.9 percent during the same time period. The former is the largest increase in six years; the latter, the deepest drop in nine years.
It’s good news for managers who have endured budget-cutting headaches for what seems an eternity. Has your company seen the gains? Here are five examples of ways some of our customers have increased their productivity.
Productivity isn’t just a fashionable buzzword.
1. Problem: Caller needed to remove data validation from an inherited spreadsheet but had no idea where to begin.
Solution: She called us, and one of our consultants helped her with her issue right away, within five minutes. While she was on the call, she also learned how to use Excel’s Autofilter feature and how to protect her worksheet so formulas are not modified.
Productivity gain: Without assistance, she would have spent at least an hour trying to solve her problem. Add to that what she learned about filtering data and protecting worksheets, and she saved at least four hours a week. Scale that over a year, and she saved her company more than 200 hours of lost productivity.
2. Problem: Customer was trying to copy data from one Excel workbook to another, but she kept getting an error message and could not copy or paste anything. She was about to manually enter everything into a new workbook, but called PC Helps.
Solution: After trying numerous solutions, a PC Helps consultant fixed the customer’s issue by running a repair on the application.
Productivity gain: The caller was admittedly baffled by the issue. “Without help, I’m afraid I would have faced a significant amount of time and effort to recreate a corrupted Excel spreadsheet.”
3. Problem: Customer saw a colleague beginning to create 200 separate letters to mail to clients. She remembered once using a feature that generated them for you, but couldn’t remember what it was called or where to find it in Microsoft Word.
Solution: She called PC Helps on behalf of her colleague, and a consultant showed her the Mail Merge feature in Word. Problem solved in 12 minutes.
Productivity gain: It would have easily taken a day or two to create 200 letters manually.
4. Problem: Customer’s Word document was corrupted and would not open.
Solution: Customer was set to request a copy of the file from the previous night’s backup, which would have taken at least a day and would not have included the day’s edits. He called PC Helps, however, and one of our consultants restored the file in 15 minutes.
Productivity gain: The customer avoided a day of lost productivity, plus extra time he would have had to spend re-editing.
5. Problem: Customer needed to insert hyperlinks into an e-mail message, but could not find the solution in Microsoft’s help files. The customer was manually typing entire links into messages, and his frustration level was growing.
Solution: He called PC Helps and a consultant delivered a solution in five minutes, 53 seconds. She showed him how to enable Word as his e-mail editor for Outlook 2003, and how to use the menus to insert hyperlinks.
Productivity gain: According to the customer, PC Helps saved him “a lot of hours, reduced my frustration levels, and helped me make my deadlines.”
Productivity isn’t just a fashionable buzzword; increasing it is vital to a company’s financial health in a shaky economy.
Based on a PC Helps survey of knowledge workers at Fortune 500 companies, we found that employees will spend nearly three hours working to solve an issue with a standard software application on their own. For one knowledge worker making $52k annually, that equates to more than $75 per solution.
The breakdown without software support:
- Knowledge worker spends 3 hours on one solution without support: $ 75
- Worker will need help on other software issues 4 times per year, on average: 4x$75 = $ 300
- In a company with 1,200 end-user, with a 50% population call projection, each seeking help 4 times per year: 600x$300= $180,000
The breakdown using PC Helps LLC:
- Knowledge worker spends a fraction of the time on solution with PC Helps: $25
- Worker will need help on other software issues 4 times per year, on average: 4 x $25= $ 100
- In a company with 1,200 employees, with a 50% population call projection, each seeking help 4 times per year: 600x$100= $60,000
(For more info on downtime and increasing productivity, read an earlier post, “Downtime Revisited.”)
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