Improve Productivity with Dual Screens

Employees are a firm’s biggest investment. Firm managers are always struggling with how to provide the biggest return on their largest investment by improving employee productivity.  One example of a large gain in productivity happens to be simple, cheap and easy to deploy. What is it? Dual monitor screens. Or, for those highly productive people three to four screens.

Orion’s informal Study

Orion has informally polled its customers about dual monitor screens on several occasions. The question was posed to Attorneys, Assistants, Paralegals and Administrators alike. Overwhelmingly, if not 100%, users cannot imagine life without dual screens. We have even had reports of reduced stress, higher dissatisfaction and lower speed. This information closely resembles other expertly documented reports. For instance, NEC studied the benefits and concluded similar findings; the financial impact in the report is located to the right.

Simple Math

You can purchase a 2nd monitor for about $150 at any local technology store. You can also purchase a video card for about $30 that will support dual screens. Given an example of a total employee compensation of $50,000 annually, a $180 investment equates to less than .36% of an investment. You simply cannot provide a better return on investment.

Duals Screens and Applications (Including Orion)

Most new applications are designed with dual monitors in mind. For instance, MS Word and Outlook are multi-monitor friendly that allows for docking of screens. This reduces toggling and keeps key applications in constant view for monitoring or editing.

Orion is also dual monitor friendly. As a convenience, Orion retains the location of where you last position items. For instance, you can keep the time manager docked on one monitor to constantly bill for your time. You may also use it with smart timers to keep track of all those different tasks and projects.

There is one caveat with this. Since Orion remembers the location of your different applications, situations can arise. Sometimes when you change screens, the location of the applications is no longer valid, or considered off screen. This can frequently happen when users have dual screens at the office, but then use a Terminal or Citrix server from home utilizing just one screen. Since the size of the desktop is no longer the same, you can no longer “see” the application when opened. You may encounter a symptom of this when needing to select a dialog box, but you cannot see the box to make your selection.

Fortunately, Orion provides relief for this. It’s called Cascading Forms. By choosing this option, you are telling Windows to reorganize your windows into a concise overlapping view. You can find this option in the Task Bar (bottom right of Windows). Simply right click on the Orion icon, and choose Cascade All Forms.

After you select this, all your windows will show in a logical order centered to your desktop. You can then reposition them manually.

(FYI - NEC spent $50,000 in studying productivity gains in the workplace - To translate these productivity gains into dollars and cents, the study breaks out the potential savings by number of employees and by monitor configuration. For example, moving from a single 17-inch screen to a setup of dual 19-inch monitors brings a productivity gain that translates to 56 extra days of work per employee per year, or approximately $1.5 million in cost savings per year for a company of 250 employees.)