The Two Employees You Didn’t Know You Hired (and How to Fire Them)

The Ghost Employee Haunting Your Payroll

Every business leader knows employees aren’t 100% utilized. Coffee breaks, small talk, the occasional doom scroll—we expect some slack in the system. But there’s one ghost employee you didn’t hire and can’t fire: downtime.

And downtime doesn’t arrive in dramatic fashion like a data breach or a server fire. It seeps in through the mundane: a forgotten password here, a spinning wheel there, a Wi-Fi dropout during a client call. Death by a thousand clicks.

How Much Time Are We Talking About?

Let’s break down a normal week in the life of your office:

• Password resets – 5–10 minutes each. Across 50 employees, that’s a full workday gone every week.

• Rebooting after updates – 10–15 minutes of staring at a progress bar. Monthly patches quickly add up to hours per person.

• Router or internet outages – 55% of businesses experience at least one per week, typically lasting about an hour. That’s an entire company stalled, customers waiting, deals delayed.

• Slow logins and app launches – 3 minutes here, 5 minutes there. Multiply by hundreds of logins a year and it’s weeks of work lost.

• Video call restarts – Each Wi-Fi hiccup burns 5–10 minutes, plus credibility with clients.

22 minutes is the runtime of a full episode of The Office. Every employee in your company is essentially watching one episode of The Office everyday instead of working—except no one’s laughing. Their dealing with the issues stated above.

In payroll terms, that’s a ghost employee draining $2,500–$4,000 per person, per year. A 50-person company is essentially paying $125K annually for nothing. That’s enough to hire two real employees.

The Second-Order Costs

The money is obvious. The invisible costs are possibly worse:

• Stress and burnout – 39% of employees say outages increase their workload and backlog.

• Turnover risk – No one brags about their “amazing IT experience.” Frustrated employees leave.

• Customer trust erosion – Clients don’t care if it was a Wi-Fi glitch; they just know you missed the call.

Downtime doesn’t just kill productivity. It poisons morale and corrodes trust.

And it’s not the only invisible cost. Just like ghost employees drain your payroll, unused software and duplicate licenses silently drain your profits. We wrote about that in Silent Leaks, Sinking Profits — a companion piece on hidden tech waste.

Why IT Leaders Should Care

Most executives already accept that “tech issues happen.” What they don’t see is the compounding effect. Each forgotten password is a 10-minute tax. Each rebooted router is an unpaid lunch break. Over time, those micro-frustrations stack into ghost employees you didn’t budget for.

What You Can Do About It

You can’t get to zero downtime. But you can cut it in half. That’s worth real money.

• Invest in speed – Single sign-on, reliable Wi-Fi, and hardware refreshes every 2–4 years.

• Shrink the help desk gap – Waiting two hours for a reset is the same as lighting payroll on fire.

• Track downtime – Only 42% of companies measure lost productivity. The ones who do find easy wins.

• Partner smartly – An MSP, like Kosh Solutions, or capable tech team won’t make every login instant, but cutting downtime from 10 days per year to 5 saves six figures for mid-sized businesses.

The Real Story

Here’s the narrative: You didn’t “save” money by delaying a hardware refresh or skimping on IT support—you hired another ghost employee. And that ghost shows up every day, drains payroll, stresses your staff, and disappoints your customers.

Or, put bluntly: You can keep paying for ghost employees—or you can invest in real productivity.

Here's a calculator we put together to help you estimate and understand the impact of these technical downtimes.

If downtime is one ghost employee, software waste is its twin. Check out Silent Leaks, Sinking Profits to see how unused tools and licenses quietly bleed thousands from even the most well-run companies.

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Disclaimer

The information contained in this communication is intended for limited use for informational purposes only. It is not considered professional advice, and instead, is general information that may or may not apply to specific situations. Each case is unique and should be evaluated on its own by a professional qualified to provide advice specifically intended to protect your individual situation. Kosh is not liable for improper use of this information.