Your 3-Step Plan to Avoid the Invisible Tax

It’s easy in IT to see a large IT invoice and think something needs to be done about it, but have you ever stopped to think about how much lost productivity is costing your business? Chances are, it’s even more than what it costs to receive IT support. Today, we’re exploring this invisible tax you pay due to poor IT performance (and what you can do to stop it).

Small Expenses Add Up

In IT, there are small issues and major problems. The big ones are usually more flashy and expensive to fix, and as a result, they take the spotlight. The reality is that these problems are rare in comparison to the small issues, and it’s the little things piling up that eat into your profits.

This “micro-friction,” or the accumulation of small technology issues that your team encounters on a day-to-day basis, is a serious problem in and of itself. If your team deals with it so much that they’ve stopped reporting these issues, then nothing is done to resolve them. Here’s what micro-friction includes:

• The 3 minutes it takes for a slow VPN to connect every morning.
• The spinning wheel that appears every time a large spreadsheet is opened.
• Redundant data entry because your CRM and accounting software do not talk to each other.
• The 10-minute context switch that’s lost when an app freezes and an employee loses their train of thought.

Imagine if just one employee loses 15 minutes of their day to these issues. That’s over an hour per week! If you have a team of 50, then that’s 2,500 hours of lost labor every year, which is a massive loss.

How the Calculations Break Down

According to industry averages, sub-optimal technology can cost a company up to 14 percent of its total productivity. This is the invisible tax, and it’s a budget killer.

The Formula: (Total Annual Payroll) times 0.14 = Your Technology Tax

Consider the math:

• For a company with a $500,000 payroll, the tax is $70,000.
• For a company with a $1,000,000 payroll, the tax is $140,000.
• For a company with a $2,000,000 payroll, the tax is $280,000.

If you were to spend $50,000 to modernize your infrastructure, you’d make that back pretty quickly compared to the $200,000 in labor that’s being wasted on micro-friction. Really, going all-in on a modern infrastructure is a true investment that does, in fact, pay off.

It’s Not All About Money

The invisible tax also impacts company culture and sends a certain message to your employees.

Your star employees are likely the ones that hate friction the most, and they might do great work that gets held back by the tools or services you use. This leads to frustration and workplace dissatisfaction. In situations like this, what’s stopping them from thinking about jumping ship to work for a business that actually respects their time and expertise?

Continuing to suffer the invisible tax is risking your best talent, and it will eventually lead to losses that are difficult to recover from. Worse yet, it’s not hard to avoid; it just takes an admission that you have a problem to solve.

Your 3-Step Plan to Recover Productivity

Unlike other taxes, you can choose to avoid the invisible tax. Here’s how to do so:

Perform a Friction Audit

Ask your staff about their biggest technology hurdles. What can you do to help them work without feeling like they want to throw their computer against the wall?

Kill Zombie Processes

If your business has manual workarounds to processes that just don’t work the way they should, implement the fix, then update the process.

Invest in Flow

Upgrades should reduce latency; for example, using Single Sign-On (SSO), faster cloud integrations, and hardware refreshes.

Don’t Suffer the Invisible Tax Needlessly

You’re already paying for high-performing IT; you’re just not seeing the results you want. If you’re paying for it in lost hours, missed deadlines, and frustrations from staff, take a step back and implement a roadmap to eliminate the invisible tax. We can help you with that. To learn more, call us at (205) 208-0340.