A survey of 1,000-plus office workers in the UK has found that more than two thirds of desk-based employees spend up to an hour a day looking for ‘lost’ documents.
This wasted time is costing British businesses up to £15 billion (£15,388,652,760) every year, according to research from infoMENTUM, carried out by independent research agency Censuswide.
The infoMENTUM research found that employees are getting increasingly frustrated at not being able to locate the documents they need; nearly 20% of respondents had to waste additional time recreating documents from scratch, as a result.
Slow and awkward IT systems and out of date hardware and software are blamed as the primary cause of this lost time. More than 20% of those interviewed described their organisation’s IT systems and processes as archaic, unreliable, slow and awkward. Nearly 60% said that their IT system is only ever updated occasionally, nearly 10% stated it was only upgraded when the system was broken and 3% admitted it was never updated.
Vikram Setia, co-founder at infoMENTUM, said: "With everything online instantly accessible it seems ludicrous that so many UK employees are being held up by their own company’s network and systems.
"In today’s market, where companies are determined to improve efficiencies to meet profitability targets, employees need to be focussing on their jobs and helping grow the business, not looking for documents or even creating new ones from scratch when they can’t find what they’re looking for. A streamlined and accessible information management system should be at the heart of any company’s IT policy and this clearly isn’t happening."
More than 93% of UK office workers believe that access to the files and documentation they need is important and helps them to do their job more efficiently and effectively. A further 43.5% of those surveyed agree that better technology such as laptops and PCs would help make their job easier.
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