Your employees are spending hours looking for documents. Why?

Modern business hinges on easy access access to critical information: that forecasting deck you need to present to the board, the market research report that needs to be distributed to stakeholders, even invoices can get lost in this haze.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. We were told that technology would make work life easier, and it would be an exaggeration to say it isn’t in certain ways. As far as Information Management goes, though things seem like they’re getting more complex, not less. We’ve actually covered the reasons for this in an earlier article.

Many workers waste time every day searching for and through documents. Crucially, this seemingly small issue gets worse the more systems that are added, until you’re juggling cloud drives, internal intranets, local devices and sometimes up to a dozen proprietary systems (not even counting physical documents!) to simply get hold of one PPT containing one historical datapoint.

25% of a working day is spent looking for information

It’s easy to underestimate the true impact all this wasted time, but we have firm figures: According to a recent McKinsey study, employees spend an average of 1.8 hours each day just searching for information. This means almost 25% of an employee’s working day simply vanishes. That’s 25% of staff costs in de facto terms being allocated to fumbling through systems and folders.

It’s not just McKinsey , research from Adobe has found that nearly half of employees (48%) regularly struggle to find documents they need, with many describing their organization’s filing systems as overly complicated or ineffective. Over time, these daily frustrations can reduce overall productivity and detract from employees’ main tasks.

What’s the financial impact?

We’ve briefly mentioned this already, but this loss of productivity translates directly into financial pain. IDC research highlights that businesses lose up to 21.3% of productivity due to document-related challenges. In monetary terms, this means the average business is spending about US $19,732 per information worker annually.

Even issues like misfiling a document can cost a company approximately $125 per instance, while lost documents may cost businesses between $350 and $700 each in administrative expenses. It’s important to note that this isn’t an issue with employees themselves, these frustrations are continually aired by all employees who simply want to do what they were paid to do, not be an archivist in an increasingly corporate library.

Direct costs aren’t the only financial impact. Delayed decision-making, and, probably most critically for anyone in sales, reduced customer satisfaction due to poor document management adds costs that are harder to quantify, but almost certainly damage your company reputationally.

It also hurts staff turnover

Unsurprisingly, the knock-on effect on staff morale isn’t great. People aren’t just stressed when they can’t find what they need, they’re anxious! After all, it doesn’t reflect well on their own performance even though it may not be their fault. According to APQC, some employees spend only 30 out of 40 working hours each week on productive tasks, with the rest consumed by inefficiencies such as document retrieval.

Frustration causes staff turnover, leading to additional costs for something like Information Management that should not be this difficult. A good document management system that seeks to unify rather than fragment information is crucial for maintaining a positive working environment.

What can be done about it?

As we tell our clients: Improving document management requires a holistic approach, it’s a matter of providing a solution to a problem rather than a piece of software off-the-shelf. Start by evaluating existing systems: think of it like an audit of where every piece of information in your business is created and ultimately goes. Centralizing all this into one solution will simplify retrieval.

These audits should be performed regularly, ensuring unused or outdated tools are eliminated (you might have heard of “Shadow IT”, if not we go into detail about this in the report mentioned below). After this point, we find the most undervalued part of this whole exercise is training your employees on what you’ve done and how to use any new system. Making this a part of on-boarding is also really important.

Ready to simplify your information management?

For a deeper dive into managing information complexity effectively, download our comprehensive white paper, “Challenging Complexity: A Guide for Managing Information More Simply.“