Tip of the Week: How to Dilute Pure and Unadulterated Downtime

We talk a lot about how downtime experienced from a technology issue like a server outage can destroy your company’s productivity. Yet, we’ve not distinguished between the different types of downtime, with the worst kind being pure and unadulterated downtime. What is pure downtime and how can you dilute it?

When downtime hits, your employees are unable to continue working on any task that’s dependant upon the broken technology. In a situation like this, what’s an interrupted worker to do? If the downtime experience is of the pure and unadulterated variety, then the worker will just sit there and blankly stare at their screen.

As ridiculous of a scenario as this sounds, this actually happens more than you would think. Many workers will rejoice at downtime because they view it as an extra break in their workday. When their company’s system goes down, they may step outside for some fresh air or whip out their smartphones for a round of Flappy Bird. Attitudes like this toward downtime make the downtime experience as costly as it can possibly be, i.e., pure and unadulterated downtime.

For white collar employees, this pure downtown scenario happens quite often. If an employee’s job is totally dependent upon using applications that require a network connection, then they will be up the creek without a paddle when the network goes down. Now, in the same way that having a backup solution in place for your data will help prevent costly downtime, so too will having backup work options in place for your team help to bring down the expense of downtime.

You can think of taking precautions like these as “diluting the downtime.” Implementing backup work tasks and alternative options doesn’t have to be an intense process, it could be as simple as making sure that workstations are equipped with productivity applications that can function offline. Even storing cleaning supplies nearby and instructing employees to clean the office while the network is down will help ensure that your downtime experience isn’t a complete and utter waste of time.

Here are a few more ways that you can backup your work by diluting your downtime:

• Use downtime as a chance to follow up with phone calls.
• During downtime, use an offline word processing program to write a response to an important email that you don’t need to view online in order to compose. When email is back online, then copy and paste the text into the email.
• Even using downtime to take a restroom break will ensure that the next restroom break won’t cut into company time.

When it comes down to it, taking time to implement downtime-diluting measures like these shouldn’t be a burden; it should be intuitive for anybody with a good worth ethic. Pure and unadulterated downtime should make an employee that cares about productivity feel anxious because they’re aware of how much money their inaction is taking away from their company’s bottom line.

In fact, a good interview question to ask of a potential job candidate would be, “What are your past experiences in dealing with downtime?” How they respond to this question will tell you much about their work ethic.

Of course, the very best way to deal with downtime is to prevent it altogether. k_Street Consulting, LLC offers your business a proactive approach to preventing downtime with our Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) solution. With BDR, if your server goes down, we’ll jump into action and make your backed up data available to your workers as quickly as possible; thus, minimizing the amount of time a worker blankly looks at their computer.

For more tips on how to dilute your downtime, call k_Street Consulting, LLC at (202) 640-2737.