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Employees spend nearly 20% of their day looking for information

 

Ever wasted half an hour hunting for a document that should be easy to find? You’re not alone. In fact, most employees do this daily, digging through emails, shared drives, and chat threads just to locate the right version of something. It’s frustrating, inefficient, and expensive. And yet, businesses don’t seem to clock just how much of a drain this is.

 

While the report is from 2012, McKinsey estimated that 19% of a knowledge worker’s day is spent searching and gathering information and that effective tools could improve productivity by over 30%.

 

Simple maths will tell you how much an organisation could be wasting just paying people to hunt for information. (Average salary / 5 x number of staff). But that’s not the real issue, is it? The real question is: what decisions are being made, and what resources are being wasted because people don’t have access to the right information?

 

Yet, somehow, this isn’t seen as a serious problem. Why? Because the people in charge rarely feel the pain themselves. For senior management, information flows seamlessly. They have assistants, streamlined reporting, and priority access to key data. When leaders do recognise inefficiencies, they often view them through a top-down lens: "We need better document control" or "Let's invest in another software tool."

 

Ask anyone on the ground how they really feel about finding information in their organisation, and you’ll hear a mix of sighs, eye-rolls, and horror stories. Marketing can’t find the latest sales figures because they’re buried in someone’s email. Finance is working off a different spreadsheet than operations, leading to conflicting reports. And new hires? They spend the first few months learning where everything actually is rather than doing their jobs. It’s chaos, but because it happens in a hundred small moments rather than one dramatic failure, it goes unnoticed.

 

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve started a conversation and heard the same groans and real-life stories. And no organisation is immune. A pilot from a major airline once told me they could never find out what the company’s leave policy was. At least all the technical documents were in place—or so we hope—but the same level of commitment was lacking in their personnel support.

I once worked for a large (very large and very unavoidable) government department where networking wasn’t just about career progression, it was how people found information. Why? Because no one could ever find anything on the internal SharePoint sites. I don’t know if this was true across the whole organisation, but it was certainly true in IT. (And I do wonder if IT departments are particularly guilty of this.) Coming from a team where everything was documented, I couldn’t get my head around it. Instead of looking things up, people would phone a contact and ask if they knew the answer, or knew someone who might. Honest. A very large government department, running on word of mouth.

 

I’ve built and modified SharePoint sites for multiple organisations, and the key is always the same: think from the User Perspective. How do people search? What do they need most often? What structure makes sense to them?

When I worked in logistics, the golden mantra was: Right stuff, right place, right time, right quantity, right condition. It seemed instinctive to apply that thinking to information: Right information. Right people. Right format. Right place. Right depth.

And it often takes fresh eyes to see the problems. Once someone becomes used to the status quo, they stop questioning it. That’s why new hires are invaluable. Every time they struggle to find something, it’s an opportunity to fix the system, if you’re paying attention.

 

I know no team wants an outsider trampling all over their SharePoint sites, but I also know just how much time, effort, and waste I can save businesses with effective Information Management. I’ve worked in one government department where it was critical to document everything, and I’ve seen first-hand how much smoother things run when that information is accessible and the team I ran was recognised for its achievements. It’s not about forcing more documentation—it’s about making the right information available to the right people at the right time.

 

If this sounds familiar and you’re tired of watching valuable hours disappear into the black hole of information hunting, let’s talk. I can help you cut through the noise and create a system that actually works