Productivity is a critical element for the success of any business. Time is money and wasted time is wasted money. When one minute a day for an employee that has a total cost to the employer of $10 an hour equals $41.67 a year, decisions about something as simple as an office productivity tool can matter more than most people think.

The average total cost of a U.S. employee is about $30 dollars an hour. This would make the one minute a day difference a $125 a year decision. This may not sound like a lot to many people, but take these other scenarios into account.

What if the difference is 5 minutes a day? That’s $625 per year. Ask yourself, how sensitive is your workforce to differences between productivity suites? What does your distribution of employees’ total cost look like? Do you have mostly above average, average, or below total cost employees? Are your employees constrained or a bottleneck? Are your employees always behind in delivering services to their internal or external customers?

The next question to ask is how many employees do you have? What if you have 10,000 average cost employees? For a one minute a day difference, that would be $1,250,000 per year of lost productivity. If it was five minutes a day with average cost employees, the total lost productivity would be $6,250,000 per year.

One year of lost productivity may not make that much difference. Year after year of lost productivity will. If your competitors have chosen the better productivity solution, they will have a year after year advantage. Your company will seem to be working in mud compared to your competition.

Imagine you are the Chief Executive Officer of this company. Would $6.25 million per year of lost productivity, year after year, make a difference in the competitiveness or profits of your company? Is this real lost productivity or is it just a numbers game? Does your CIO know? If you have a Chief Information Officer, the answer is likely no. If you have a Chief Innovation Officer, the answer is yes. Which CIO does your company have?

Now, what if your competitor has a Chief Innovation Officer and your company just has the traditional CIO? Chief Innovation Officers are more likely to consistently find the opportunities to increase productivity year after year and the difference is likely to be much more than just the difference in an office productivity suite.