Running an office comes with many challenges, keeping your employees on task should not be one of them. In an ideal office, a worker will spend every minute at their workstation plugging away on projects, doing their due diligence. In reality, the average employee wastes two hours per day of company time on personal internet use.
If you are looking to squeeze out more productivity from your staff, then just by controlling internet usage alone will increase staff performance by 25 percent. Ironically, the solution to combat this office productivity problem caused by technology is with technology. The Universal Threat Management (UTM) is a security solution that is best known for strengthening your network firewall and protecting it from every conceivable cyber threat, like spam, malware, viruses, etc.; UTM is also an effective tool to block employee access from unapproved websites.
With UTM, you are in control of your network. You can filter out the websites that are the biggest culprits of wasting company time, like Facebook, YouTube, personal email, Pinterest, Twitter; basically, anything on the internet that you see draining your company’s time and resources, you can axe it by adjusting the UTM settings. Of course, the UTM device will also automatically block websites that are security threats to your network, and sites that are inappropriate for work, if you know what I mean.
Believe or not, there are some employees who are responsible and can handle having total access to the internet. For these good eggs, you can adjust the UTM settings to allow certain employees access to certain websites. This means you can allow Facebook access to the employees who are responsible for posting to your company’s Facebook page, while denying Facebook access to employees addicted to Farmville.
You can even use the UTM to keep yourself productive and less distracted from the internet. Marketing group VerticalResponse has found that 43% of small businesses spend 6 or more hours a week on social media, and ⅓ of business owners/CEOs want to spend less time on social media. By giving control of the UTM settings to a trusted colleague, the UTM can help keep you accountable with your own internet usage.
The UTM not only makes your staff more productive by preventing the wasting of time, UTM can also add at least one additional hour to an employee's work week with anytime access. You do not want to be a total Grinch to your employees and take away everything they love; with a managed UTM, you can give your employees what they want by setting up a secure solution for them to remote into your network. By saving employees from the time and expense of commuting, and allowing them to work in preferred surroundings like home or a coffee shop, they will be happier and more productive and crank out at least one additional hour worth of work at the end of the week.
Increased staff productivity and a secure network are only a few of the benefits that come with UTM. Call Elite Integration at (281) 313-1321 to learn more about the many features of UTM and how it can help your business. There are also several different models of UTM that are designed for a specific sized business, whether you have 5 users or 2,500 users, there is a UTM model that is just the right size for your business, call Elite Integration today and let us find a UTM that is right for you.
