Tip of the Week: Shave Time Off the Work Day By Adding More Monitors

If your employees are still working at workstations with a single monitor, you may be doing your workplace productivity a disservice. While adding a second screen to their desk may not seem like an effective efficiency booster at first, the benefits it can have are very real.

How Does It Help?
While there are obvious time-saving benefits to not needing to flip back and forth between different windows and applications, it may not be so obvious how quickly that saved time can add up. Switching via mouse takes approximately 1.5 seconds, plus the half second it takes for the other document to open, meaning that, if you were transferring data from one doc to another, each piece of data you entered would take about two additional seconds of time. This time would be eliminated by incorporating a second monitor into your workstation.

How it Adds Up
Granted, while these two seconds don’t seem significant initially, they can add up very quickly when similar amounts of time are shaved from every task, every day, at every workstation. For example, let’s assume you had 30 employees, all responsible for data entry. We’ll be comparing a single-monitor setup to a two-monitor setup, under the assumption that each employee was responsible for updating 2,500 pieces of data each day, as just one of their tasks. If the two-seconds-saved-for-each-piece-of-data remained constant, that would be 5,000 seconds saved for each employee, or 83 minutes every day. Multiply that by your 30 hypothetical employees, and you’re looking at a time savings of 41 or so hours. That’s like having five extra employees working to complete this task, for the one-time investment of a second monitor for each of your employees.

Additional Uses of Additional Monitors
You also have to remember, there are plenty of other uses for multiple displays that may also help your employees with their tasks in terms of efficiency, quality, or both. For instance, if your business fields a large volume of interpersonal messages, your employees may be better served by having the application up and visible at all times so they can be sure they did not miss a message. Or, if your business deals with lengthy, in-depth spreadsheets, expanding one across both monitors can help give your employees a more cohesive view of its contents (a better look at the ‘big picture,’ so to speak).

If a multiple-monitor setup sounds like it can help you eliminate some inefficiencies in your workflow, reach out to us at Washington Works at 301-571-5040.