Having enough bandwidth isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity. There is a direct relationship between network bandwidth and employee productivity – which makes this an important concern for businesses to address. So, how much is enough? When is your bandwidth at capacity? What business operations require bandwidth? All of these questions, and more, should be addressed with your IT team – internal and external – to ensure you are providing proper bandwidth for employee productivity.

The Importance of Adequate Resources

Think of it this way: if you had a team of sales reps in your office and only one telephone for these agents to share, your sales volumes would rapidly suffer and your people would frequently sit idle. Sales reps would be lining up, impatiently urging the person using the line to wrap it up quickly and give others a chance at the action. The calls being made wouldn’t be very high quality because the demand for the resources, in this case, the phone, were very distracting. So, not only are your reps working at much less than full capacity, but the ones that are trying to work aren’t able to do it to the best of their abilities.

Inadequate resources, whether it is phones or bandwidth, will eventually begin to cause problems – first at the productivity level and then possibly affecting profits.

The Effects of Bandwidth – Good & Bad

When you have adequate bandwidth allocation, your employees are better able to attend to their jobs. They’re not stalled when performing tasks such as downloading and uploading important files and documents. When web pages load in an acceptable amount of time and emails can be downloaded and read without slowing down the network, communication levels are maintained and business can proceed as usual. This efficiency translates into productivity and cost-savings.

Inadequate bandwidth, on the other hand, results in slowed applications, delayed access and interrupted tasks. Sometimes the entire network can become inaccessible if bandwidth levels are too low. If this occurs, everything at your office will come to a halt. If your employees are waiting around because resources are poorly allocated, then nothing’s getting done. Here are some of the additional consequences of unsuitable bandwidth:

• Employees will be frustrated
• Customers may be frustrated with your team’s response time
• Employees will try and fill their time – often with unnecessary busywork or non-work related tasks
• Processes, tasks and turnaround time will take longer than necessary
• This decreased productivity could affect your bottom line

How Much Bandwidth is Enough?

Bandwidth is a critical component of many business applications. Everything from email, inter-office chat systems and phones, to network-wide software access, file transfers and video teleconferencing, rely upon bandwidth. We are running businesses in an age where everything we do relies upon the Internet, networks, servers and the cloud; bandwidth is the determining factor that allows all of these to work effectively.

Having enough bandwidth for these day-to-day activities is vital for continued operation. Without this, you’ll waste precious time and money. One of the best ways to determine how much bandwidth your business requires is by performing an audit that analyzes the current bandwidth your employees are consuming, and identifying what tasks and applications are being used. Once you have this information, it can also be helpful to determine what changes are likely to happen in the future, so you can plan accordingly.

Don’t wait until bandwidth becomes a problem. Be proactive and enable your employees to remain productive – request an assessment of your bandwidth requirements and work with a specialist to solve and/or prevent issues.