Annie Pilon is a staff writer for Small Business Trends, covering entrepreneur profiles and feature stories. She is a freelance writer specializing in marketing, social media, and creative topics. She has a bachelor’s degree from Columbia College Chicago in Journalism and Marketing Communications. She also has a passion for small businesses and entrepreneurship.

Through her first few years of professional life, she’s written everything from traditional newspaper articles to email newsletters for political campaigns.

A slow Internet connection can cost real dollars, putting stress on your business. According to a recent poll in the U.K., businesses lose 38 hours worth of productivity per employee each year due to slow Internet access and IT downtime.

Think about the cost of that to your business. Assume each employee averages $15.00 per hour. At 38 hours lost per employee, that amounts to a $570 annual loss per employee. If your business has 20 employees, you’ve lost $11,400 annually.

And that just counts the lost employee time. It doesn’t include other costs of a slow Internet connection that put stress on your business, including the disruption to sales.

But having a connection that is fast and free of constant interruptions can limit that stress and help you focus on what’s really important – growing your business.

Below we will explore how a high speed Internet connection can relieve business stress, and also how you, your team, and your business can benefit from such a connection (once you find the best high speed Internet provider for your business).

Relieve Business Stress By …

Stress #1: Not Enough Hours in the Day
Relief: Faster Download Speed

Are you hearing from employees that they have too much to do in their day? And do you face that feeling of rising stress — stress that comes from waiting for pages to load and for files such as PDFs, images and videos to download? Time is one of the most valuable assets of a business owner, and one of the most precious resources in a small business. A faster download speed takes away that unnecessary stress of employees and you “being stuck on the hourglass” while waiting for pages and files to download.

Stress #2: Team Members Not Working Together Effectively
Relief: Access to Useful Collaboration Features

You can’t expect your team to work together effectively if they don’t have the means to do so. By giving them access to tools and features like screen sharing and online conferencing, without those items freezing or taking forever to load, they can easily share ideas and complete shared projects in a timely and efficient manner.

Stress #3: Data That’s Not Backed-Up or Secure
Relief: Move Processes to the Cloud

Keeping all of your business data on a hard drive means you can only access it on one device. And if anything happens to that hard drive, your data may be gone forever. To avoid the massive amount of stress that can accompany a loss of data, you can use your high speed connection to move business processes to the cloud. This will allow you and your team to easily access it from multiple devices, while making sure that it is backed-up just in case.

Stress #4: Inefficient or Expensive Communication Systems
Relief: Having Access to VOIP Telecommunications

Traditional phone communication systems are often expensive and lack the features that can help your business effectively communicate with customers, clients and partners. Voice Over IP (VOIP) telecommunications permit lower telecommunications costs and also permit the use of mobile integration, call routing, conferencing and plenty of other useful communication features. Higher upload and download speeds provide clear call quality that matches that of traditional copper line telecommunications systems.

Stress #5: Lack of an Online Presence
Relief: Experiencing Easy Content Uploads

If you’re having trouble getting the attention of your target audience, it could be because your online presence needs work. To really invest in your company’s online strategy, you’ll likely need to create and share content like product demo videos, infographics and other multimedia. However, you don’t want to spend all day waiting for that content to upload. High speed Internet ensures that you’ll be able to quickly share basically any type of content to the ever-growing list of online and social platforms out there.

Stress #6: Difficulty With Online Security
Relief: Using a Static IP Address

A static IP address is an IP address that doesn’t change or reset itself, unlike a dynamic IP address. Having a static IP address can allow your business to run your own servers without constant interruptions that may frustrate customers visiting your site. In addition, a static IP address is required for sites that want to add a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate, which offers added security for your customers if you collect credit card or other personal information from them.

Stress #7: Customers Sitting on Hold or Not Getting Fast Answers
Relief: Freeing Up Time to Serve Customers with Faster Turnaround Times

Timeliness of responses to customers is a major factor in customer satisfaction. If customers are kept waiting and turnaround times are slow, it impacts your business in numerous ways: lower renewal rates, bad online reviews that dampen future sales, time spent calming unhappy customers and ultimately lost customers and lower sales. No company needs these kinds of stresses. High speed Internet simply helps you do everything faster — and that includes serving customers.

Stress #8: Inability to Share Large Presentations or Documents
Relief: Utilizing Huge File Sharing Capabilities

Imagine that you’ve worked all week to create a huge presentation for a new client. But when you go to send it, you find that the file is too large to send. Having a high speed connection ensures that you’ll be able to quickly and easily share large files with your team, clients or other stakeholders in your business.

Stress #9: Experiencing Connectivity Issues
Relief: Having Dedicated Support

Issues with your Internet connection can be a huge source of stress for business owners. If and when any issues arise surrounding your high speed Internet connection, your provider should be able to quickly identify the problem and help you rectify it. You can even have a Service Level Agreement that guarantees a certain amount of up-time or response time when repairs are needed.

Stress #10: Struggling to Manage Your Business
Relief: Seeing Faster Business Growth

Once high speed Internet is in place, business processes become more efficient and faster in a variety of different ways. And that enables your business to grow much more quickly overall. When you and your team don’t have to spend time waiting for files to upload or pages to reload, you can spend that time actually working to grow your business. And you can avoid all the stress involved with having an unreliable Internet connection.

While each of these may seem like small things, they actually add up to a mountain of impact on your business. Small stressors mount up and lead to overload and poor attitudes by employees who feel they have to fight with their Internet connection instead of that connection being so streamlined it helps them produce results.

By reducing stresses at various points in the day and in various processes, you end up with a well-oiled business that functions better as a whole, and is positioned to be be more efficient, productive and profitable, and serve customers more effectively.

This article originally appeared on Small Business Trends