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How to pick the best tech for your employees

Picking tech for employees to use can be rather troublesome given that you need to balance a budget and functionality.

Add to that the needs of employees and finding tech that suits your needs becomes even trickier.

But it needn’t be that difficult as we discovered at the Rectron Innovation Summit held in Johannesburg this week.

Speaking during a break-out session Rectron product manager Matthew Hall explained that businesses face a few challenges when selecting gear for employees.

The first is that employees are also consumers and as such they expect consumer level tech in the work place. That doesn’t mean they want 4K TVs on every wall but rather that things should just work.

Slow PCs with a low RAM count are a bug bear here at the htxt.africa offices and as such we’ve kitted ourselves out with high performance PCs mostly so that we can work well without having to fight with technology.

The search for specs

Our experience has taught us that the absolute minimum specifications needed to keep things moving along is a quad-core (or better) CPU with Core i5 being the minimum needed for work tasks and at least 8GB of RAM given how resource hungry Windows 10 and applications like Google Chrome are.

That however is easier said than done when the economy seems to slip further and further down a slope.

We will admit that our guidelines might not work for all businesses so Hall shared a few tips on how to identify the features you need and how that will shape your buying decision.

Is the employee going to be on the road or at a desk? Employees on the road might need a lighter notebook with a better battery than an office worker who can access power at any time.

Performance is important but the degree of performance can vary depending on whether the employee is crunching numbers or just accessing an online CRM portal.

Funnily enough the size of the display can also have an impact on the type of tech you choose. For instance your developers and content creators need a larger display than the sales person does.

Just quality of life things

Some other things to consider when shopping for tech are small quality of life purchases that make the work day easier.

In the instance of employees that travel, a comfortable bag is a necessity. Adapters and converters for notebooks that don’t have legacy ports such as HDMI or even older USB ports are also a must if you plan to have your employees making client presentations.

Mouse and keyboard peripherals are also worth considering. For employees that spend a lot of time typing consider keyboards that have comfort front of mind.

Hall also made mention of something that made us go “that’s a good idea”.

In the case of notebooks consider buying a second power adapter. That way an employee can keep one in their bag and another at the office. No more down time as an employee goes back home to get a power cable.

Things like routers are also worth investing. If your business is paying for a fibre connection and you’re using the router your ISP gave you for free that is bad news bears. Look for a router or switch that will allow your employees to not only get the best speeds possible when using a LAN cable but over wireless connectivity as well.

These are just a few things to consider when shopping for tech.

Quite simply it boils down to doing research and putting some thought into what it is that would make your employees able to work that much better.

[Image – CC 0 Creative Commons Pixabay]

 

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