The managed print industry has spent the better part of a decade moving the conversation beyond device uptime and toward fleet optimization, print security, cost-per-page modeling, and sustainability reporting. Those conversations are worth having. But a survey published earlier this year suggests that the basic reliability question, whether the printer does what the employee needs it to do on the first attempt, is still unsettled for most workers.
Per new data from Standley Systems, which surveyed 500 desk-based workers on how everyday office technology affects their workday, only 18% say printing, copying, or scanning always works correctly on the first try. That hasn’t budged much despite years of fleet management maturation, showing just how much provider claims of value don’t line up with what employees are actually experiencing on the floor.
Print Failures that Don’t Make It to A Ticket
When print, copy, or scan tasks fail, 52% of workers say they retry or troubleshoot the issue themselves, and 22% switch to a different device. Just 15% contact IT or support. Workers handle print problems on their own because escalating them feels like more work. This is a pattern the survey confirmed broadly, with 76% of desk workers saying they avoid contacting IT at least sometimes because it feels like more effort than it’s worth.
For managed print providers, this means service performance data is probably undercounting actual device failures. If the majority of print problems are retried, worked around, or quietly abandoned, then help desk logs and service reports are reflecting a best-case version of fleet reliability. What clients actually experience is considerably worse. Organizations may be paying for a managed service and still running into print failures daily without those failures ever prompting a service call.
The Oklahoma data in the Standley Systems survey makes this concrete. In that sample, 64% of workers retry or troubleshoot print and scan problems themselves, well above the 52% national figure. Sixteen percent say waiting for printing or scanning creates the most waiting-around time in their workday, compared with 7% overall. That’s a significant share of the workday being lost to a task that most employees and managers assume takes a minute.
Where Print Fits in The Broader Productivity Picture
Print reliability doesn’t exist in isolation from the rest of the employee technology experience. The Standley Systems survey found that 85% of desk workers encounter some kind of tech-related slowdown at least once per workday, and close to half lose more than 30 minutes per week across all tech issues. Printing, copying, and scanning are contributors to that total. They’re not the whole story, but a recurring piece of it.
The survey also found that only 30% of workers regain focus immediately after any tech interruption, and another 30% say it takes at least six minutes. A failed print job takes more than a few minutes of troubleshooting. For a worker mid-task, it’s a context switch that has its own recovery cost. Those costs don’t appear in a contract or a service report, but they’re evident in the survey responses. Fifty-three percent of workers say tech issues leave them frustrated, 42% say they feel stressed, and 37% say they had to redo work in the prior month because of a tech slowdown.
What This Means for How Managed Print Is Sold
The managed print value proposition has historically centered on cost control. Reducing spend on toner, paper, and device maintenance are top selling points. That framing made sense when the primary buyer was a procurement or finance decision-maker. As managed IT and managed print converge, and as HR and operations leadership have more say in vendor decisions, the productivity argument has become more available and more relevant.
The Standley Systems survey found that 69% of workers would rather their workplace invest in preventing tech issues than expect employees to work around them. Proactive monitoring, remote diagnostics, and predictive maintenance are already standard in most managed print offerings. The question is whether providers are quantifying the employee time those capabilities save, or just listing them as features in a capabilities deck.
In SMB environments specifically, where there’s no dedicated print support staff and IT resources are stretched across multiple priorities, the case for managed print is clearest and the gap between what clients expect and what they experience tends to be widest. Providers who can walk into those conversations with data on what unreliable print hardware costs in employee time are talking about more than click rates and device counts.
Fewer than 1 in 5 desk workers say printing always works on the first try. That’s the baseline the industry is working from. Making the case that managed print improves it with numbers that connect to productivity, not just device performance, is where the more durable client relationships are built.
