UK employees lose 12 days a year to IT issues: Report
Key Points
- Workers in the UK are losing more than 12 working days of productivity every year to downtime caused by IT issues.
- Four in five UK employees suffered some form of IT-related downtime in the last year, most of which were connectivity or internet disruptions.
- While there are fewer technical issues reported, the cost of technical disruption to the UK economy has soared to £44 billion a year.
- The data points to an increased reliance on centralised service providers and exposes a skills gap that could leave employees unable to address simpler IT issues on their own.
Workers in the UK are losing more than 12 working days of productivity every year as they wait for IT systems to recover or technical issues to be resolved.
This is according to a new nationwide study from IT support firm Managed247, which surveyed 2,000 UK employees on how often they experienced IT-related issues and the working time they lose as a result of these problems.
Four in five UK employees said they had suffered some form of IT downtime in the last year, and, on average, workers are losing the equivalent of 93 productive hours (around 12 working days) every year to technical problems.
The biggest causes of downtime are no longer issues with software. Instead, employees now more often experience disruption due to internet and connectivity failures, which are the biggest causes of lost working time.
This is a natural result of the global shift to cloud computing and the reliance on centralised web servers instead of locally hosted applications; a company using Microsoft Teams does not have a local fallback if Microsoft’s servers go down.
The amount of productive time lost to IT issues varies significantly by region, with employees in Wales losing the most working time to technical disruptions. By comparison, South England now has the lowest incidence of IT-related disruptions in Britain.
IT issues are becoming much more expensive
Employees are actually reporting fewer technical issues than they did in 2018, but the economic cost of this downtime has ballooned since then.
The findings of the report show that the financial cost of IT downtime in the UK has increased by almost £9 billion and is now estimated at £44 billion every year. This figure was calculated by comparing the reported IT downtime data from the nationwide survey with UK employment and earnings data.
This increasing productivity cost means even simple technical problems may be an expensive issue for a modern company, and this is not helped by the fact that 77% of employees surveyed in the study had received no IT or digital training from their employer in the past year.
This leaves employees less able to solve simpler technical issues on their own and can exacerbate the downtime caused by problems.
“Technology has become the backbone of almost every business, so even small disruptions now have much bigger consequences than they did a few years ago,” said Managed247 CEO and Founder John Pepper.
“What’s striking is that businesses are experiencing fewer traditional IT failures, yet downtime is costing more than ever.”
“That’s because organisations are far more dependent on technology than they were in 2018. If your internet connection goes down or staff lose access to cloud systems, productivity can grind to a halt almost instantly,” Pepper said.
