Digital Workplace Blog Series: The Impact of Organic IT on Employee Productivity

In our last blog “The Hidden Issue of Siloed Departments and Organic IT Chaos,” we discussed the impact of siloed departments that operated in isolation of each other at businesses. As the business grew, these siloed departments, such as HR and IT, added their own separate applications and systems. The result was a chaotic IT infrastructure, or what we call Organic IT.  

Organic IT has a chaotic effect on the business, from IT costs to interdepartmental communication to employee productivity. 

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When it comes to employee productivity, Organic IT can have very negative consequences because in essence your employees are billable. The more time they spend focused on their job the more the company profits. 
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In many organizations, a blind spot exists for arming employees with the tools they need to not only do their job but perform it effectively and efficiently. 
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It’s standard protocol to receive a company computer from which to work, office tools like an email account and word processing programs. Employees are given access to the company network, since most employees perform their jobs online or require online access. And occasionally, if they are lucky, they have access to an organized file share. 
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The employee receives announcements by email, which can be so multitudinous that it’s easy to miss the important ones. In addition to announcements over email, the employee must remember to keep track and watch out for all other communications, process workflows and approvals.  

Employee-facing business processes like time-off or expense reports might all require a different sign-on and interface. How does an employee keep track of all of these usernames and passwords except by keeping them in a notepad or in an insecure digital document. This does not even begin to address the amount of time wasted for the employee to learn and become intimately familiar with each system and interface. 

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Getting services from departments is unstructured and usually done through email, by phone or in person. This leaves the employee to wonder if their request is being addressed at all. Some employees, such as those in IT, at least have a Help Desk to submit tickets and service requests. 

Employee-facing business processes like time-off or expense reports might all require a different sign-on and interface. How does an employee keep track of all of these usernames and passwords except by keeping them in a notepad or in an insecure digital document. This does not even begin to address the amount of time wasted for the employee to learn and become intimately familiar with each system and interface. 

A quick search on the Internet brings up many studies that measure employee time wasted searching for information, chasing service status, and having to remember their sign-on to the eighth system accessed that day.

When put into numbers though, the cost per employee is very clear and also very staggering. An organization with 500 employees equals 1.4 million work hours per year. If the average pay rate is, say, $40 per hour, reducing wasted time by just 5% is worth nearly $3 million. Imagine what your business could do with that cost-savings. 

A secondary and possibly even more damaging result of Organic IT and siloed departments on employees is the impact to morale and level of frustration. While impossible to measure, Organic IT impacts employee productivity with regard to the number of “billable” hours during the day. Additionally, siloed departments impact employees’ ability to effectively and easily collaborate with other departments. 

Another serious casualty of Organic IT is employee turnover, which has its own sunk cost. This can be especially damaging when some of those employees who leave are high value and an invaluable asset to the business.​

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