As a business owner, you should always be on the lookout for ways in which you can improve productivity around your office. While you might look for ways in which you can declutter desks or look at management tools your employees can use, there might be one critical area that you are overlooking – your internet speed.
That’s right, the speed of your broadband could be affecting the productivity of your office more than you might imagine. Let’s take a look at how it can be affected, and what you can do to make improvements.
What causes internet speed to change?
Every broadband connection will have an average download and upload speed it can use. In homes, it tends to be around 10-11 Mbps for a standard broadband connection. A business will have a much higher demand and usage, so even a small business can have a download speed of around 75-100 Mbps.
Internet speed is basically the transfer of data to and fro from the user to the internet itself, measured with this unit of Mbps (or Megabits per second). With just one person accessing the internet, one can imagine that broadband speeds are likely to be quite good. However, once you introduce other people all trying to use the same connection – all browsing online, uploading or downloading data, sending emails – it can become quite easy to see how speeds can begin to slow down with more and more people on the network.
It does not matter how big or small your business might be, you need to make sure that your internet speed is able to handle the potentially large volume of traffic that might use it. Using a broadband speed checker to determine the speeds that you are able to get will let you see precisely whether or not your current system is up to the job.
What happens when your internet speed is low?
Ever spent ages staring at a blank web browser waiting for a page to load? Ever sat waiting for an email to send, or for a PDF to download from the cloud? These are all key indicators that your broadband speed is too low.
It might be a constant thing, or it might rise and fall depending on usage throughout the working day. For example, you might have little to no issues throughout a typical day. However, if someone needs to speak to a client using video conferencing software, this added pressure will cause things to slow for everyone in the office.
Why does this then affect productivity?
Nowadays, so much of a business’s operations take place online. We use the cloud to exchange data and documents – both internally and with clients. There are countless tools that are used to track operations and other crucial parts of a business online. In addition to this, many companies need to be able to communicate instantly with their clients to provide real-time updates to projects.
All of this becomes that bit more difficult when dealing with low internet speeds. If a webpage takes 30 seconds or more to open, that is 30 seconds when the employee is unable to get on with their task. As an isolated incident, it might not seem like that much. However, if it is an entire day of waiting for things to open or send, you will quickly end up with a lot of wasted time that could be spent far more productively.
Simple checks like ensuring that software is up-to-date and that the internet speed is able to handle the strain of the office’s needs can make a massive difference to productivity overall. No one wants their employees to end up sitting around waiting, but it can be a reality if they are not able to gain access to the materials that they need.
What improvements can I make to my internet speed?
Luckily, if you do notice that you do have a rather slow broadband connection, there are some changes you can make. Deciding to improve your broadband speed could make operations and tasks easier for your team to manage since online programs and webpages will open faster, and data can be shared far more speedily. Your employees will then be able to engage with their tasks more readily, and you should notice an improvement to your productivity.
So, how do you make these improvements? It could be a matter of upgrading and repositioning your router and introducing some boosters to your network. If you are seriously under capacity, you might wish to consider choosing a new broadband package with a greater bandwidth allowance.
Need some help deciding? Get in touch with Omnitel today. We can assess your current system and then give you some recommendations to help you improve the speed of your broadband, and hopefully the productivity of your office.
