With lockdown coming to an end in a few weeks many of us are itching to get back into the office. A lot of people are pointing out that coronavirus has shown how easy it is for many of us to work from home, but then there are plenty of other people who need the structure, free of distractions, that working in an office alongside their colleagues brings. We like networking, seeing other people’s ideas, discussing our own ideas with experts, and not the cat or our partners or children. We need spontaneous interaction which doesn’t involve someone you made a part of your bubble weeks or even months ago popping around and chatting to you for hours when you’re actually on the clock and trying to get some work done!
This is the quiet before the storm for many workplaces. As we get back to normal, or adjust to the new normal depending on how much your workplace has been affected there is a brief window currently available to get a great deal of infrastructure work done.
A lot of businesses didn’t take advantage of the furlough over the last summer to get routine maintenance and planned improvements done. I have personal experience of managers who were frustrated by their higher-ups because they didn’t use the time which was available to them to make the necessary improvements which had been discussed long before Covid even became a ‘thing’. Instead they adopted a ‘wait and see’ approach which meant that when people were able to briefly return to work in the late summer & autumn they were met with the same problems they had been facing previously, rather than enjoying souped up, improved, and effective improvements.
Winning Back Wasted Time
One of the biggest niggles you’ll find in any office is never having enough time to get the things that need seeing to done. And one of the visible aspects of time, and the wasting of it, is slow data speeds and inefficient computer hardware. Being ‘eggtimered’, gazing at the ‘spinning wheel of death’ or simply getting up to make coffee once you turn on your computer as it trundles through its start up routine each day because it takes that long to warm up are all common experiences for anyone who works in an office.
Most offices, nor the run-of-the-mill computers that they were fitted out with were designed to handle the amount of data that is used today. Some were, but many depend on copper core data cables running under the floors from each desk to a central hub which allows all the company computers to network with one another, to connect with your SaaS, the Cloud and the outside world. You can replace the computers for faster running machines, but if the data cable and hubs are still old and overloaded, it’s like trying to run a sports car down a muddy farm track.
Take Advantage Of Downtime To Improve Your Uptime
So, what’s to do? Well, you could use this leetime to update your cable network and install new infrastructure hardware which will make running and operating networked computers faster and more effective. Replacing and improving data communications hardware not only improves the environment for people who have returned to the office, it makes things faster and easier for people working from home too when they are attending virtual meetings with on site colleagues or need to access, download or upload items to or from your network.
Because it’s hidden away under carpet and ceiling tiles infrastructure is so often overlooked. Updating or even routinely maintaining it only comes to mind after all the available budget is spent on new computers which fail to go appreciably faster than the old ones because, again, they’re still trying to go at 70mph down that farm track. There’s a legend that the network installers who fit the cable used by city traders on Wall Street are instructed to locate the network hub as close to the telephone exchange as possible. Once it’s in they use the shortest possible length of cable to connect it and all the computers to it via the shortest possible fibre optic connections because computerised trading means that the microseconds that data takes to travel from one machine to another could make or lose millions in deals won or lost.
Time Is Money, So Save As Much As You Can
While it’s unlikely that your office is that incredibly dependent on time not being wasted, you will no doubt be aware that time wasted waiting for things to work multiplied across every employee who’s trying to get something routine done adds up to a lot of wasted man hours each year. And it’s not just the salaries of people staring at eggtimers or spinning wheels which is costing you money. They’re being paid to do a job which is no doubt intended to earn a profit. They’re being paid to do a job and if they can’t do that job effectively, that’s more money walking out the door.
Briant Communications offer a dependable fibre or cable network installation and maintenance service for domestic, retail, office and industrial consumers, available throughout the south east. Call on 01273 465377 or email enquiries@briantcomms.com to arrange a free, no obligation site survey and cost estimate.