Tip of the Week: No Internet? No Problem! 3 Ways to Be Productive Without the Internet

Most modern businesses need access to crucial parts of their infrastructure in order to keep operations moving forward. For example, your building’s electricity is necessary to power your technology, and without an Internet connection, you could be losing out on hours of potential productivity. What can you do to minimize downtime and make the best out of a bad situation?

The problem is that both a lack of electricity and Internet connectivity can lead to downtime, which is a well-known culprit for breaking budgets. Without electricity, your building's technology cannot function, and without the Internet, your cloud-connected systems will be inaccessible. In both cases, productivity ceases, and you’re left without access to mission critical files. Your organization should be prepared to deal with these worst-case scenarios, which means you should have contingencies put into place to prevent downtime from sudden power or Internet outages.

So, how can you bounce back from a power outage or an Internet connection problem? For starters, don’t immediately send your employees home. You only want to do this if you’re absolutely sure that there isn’t any work that needs to get done in the office. If you think that the Internet or power outage won’t last very long, you can probably get around wasting time by using this chance to take care of often-forgotten in-house tasks.

Here are some ideas for helping you through your outage:

Hold Staff Meetings
Have you ever canceled a staff meeting last minute due to an unforeseen phone call? If you don’t need technology to hold a staff meeting, there’s no better time than during an outage. If you can’t do anything anyway, you might as well talk about important initiatives, team building, or consistent issues within the workplace that need to be addressed. Think of it as a really convenient inconvenience!

Organize and Clean Your Office
There’s a saying in the service industry that applies here: if you have time to lean, you have time to clean. Instead of having your staff sitting around waiting for services to be restored, you can have them tidy up the office and clean up their own personal workplaces. If your team needs an excuse to stay in the office to make financial obligations, you can put them to work.

Catch Up On Employee Evaluations
If you haven’t had time to catch up on employee evaluations, and you have some time to spare in between trying to fix the outage, you can take some time to tell your employees how they’re doing and what can be improved upon. Critically evaluate your employees so that they know how to improve their work performance. By the time you’ve finished, you’ll have a better idea of how your team is doing, and what you can do to make it better.

If All Else Fails, Send Your Team Home
Downtime isn’t easy to overcome, and sometimes the only option that you have is to send your team home for the day. Even if this doesn’t feel like an option, and you have important work that needs to get done, there’s always the option of letting them work remotely, should they be equipped with the technology to do so. Either way, the more time that your team wastes sitting around waiting for the outage to be resolved, the more time and revenue that’s wasted.

While making the best of downtime might be your only option, at Directive, we consider downtime to be an emergency. If your network or a critical part of your IT infrastructure goes down, leaving your employees high and dry, our technicians go into emergency mode.

If your business wants to learn more about how to prevent downtime, give us call at 607.433.2200.