The online age has brought with it a whole heap of new problems that businesses need to concern themselves with. But when we talk about these problems, they usually concern external forces. We talk about cybercriminals who wish to steal our business’s precious data or infest our systems with malicious software.
But what we’re going to be talking about here are the problems that can affect businesses with even the strongest Internet security measures. These are problems that will often affect offices every day, and cause an absurd amount of unneeded frustration for the employees. Let’s take a look at these seemingly-small but undeniably significant problems that can affect businesses all over the place in the Internet age!
Disastrous speeds
This is alarmingly common in modern offices. I’m actually struggling to think of an office at which I have worked that didn’t suffer from this problem. It’s likely that you know about the pain of this problem all too well: the problem of slow Internet speeds. It doesn’t seem like employers should have an excuse beyond geographical restrictions for allowing their employees to suffer slow Internet speeds, but the issue is still very common!
Some businesses are simply trying to save money by not going with the highest speed available to them. This can be perfectly understandable, of course. Running a business is expensive enough without paying premium prices for something as seemingly basic as an Internet connection. And it’s not like everyone can expect a perfect connection; problems are, perhaps, inevitable when so many people are using the same connection. But you should be looking into a good resource for fast and reliable broadband that is affordable.
Distractions everywhere!
Now this has certainly been a problem ever since the Internet was brought into the workplace! The distracting elements of social media and the plethora of interesting articles scattered across the Internet can be very damaging to productivity in modern offices. This is especially true when you consider that everyone brings their smart devices to work these days!
The majority of employees will behave if allowed to work with a network without restrictions. But there are people who can’t seem to stay away from Facebook and Twitter. Talk to them. Don’t immediately ban social media sites – a good balance can be found. But do some investigation. Why they’re spending so much time on social media. They may be feeling slightly stressed and unable to concentrate, which might mean more than mere laziness is afoot.
Restrictions
You may think that an easy solution to the above would be to block access to such websites from your network. But when you start blocking access to websites, this can have some surprisingly negative effects. After all, think about lunch breaks. Why stop people accessing those websites then?
You’ve also got to consider that many businesses need to mine data from social media. It’s true that there are websites out there that are more distracting than others, but can you actually prove that taking these measures will improve productivity? If you can’t, then these measures are likely to be met with a lot of resentment.
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