Looking for important documents and files on work computers can seriously damage employee morale, as well as drain an employer’s time and money.
New research by Iron Mountain, which found that over half (58%) of British office workers have struggled to find important documents and files on their work computer, supports findings by the Butler Group that up to 10% of an employer’s salary costs and a quarter of its staff time can be wasted by employees looking for information.
For an employer with 250 staff, this means that up to 2,300 working hours a week, or just under two hours a day per employee, are potentially wasted, costing the business up to £700,000 a year.
Richard Ellis, sales director at Iron Mountain Digital, said: “Looking for documents can be extremely frustrating for employees as well as damaging for the business.”
“With more and more employees working remotely on laptops and struggling to deal with an ever-growing quantity of information, it is inevitable that documents will get lost - the consequence of a hard drive failure, the theft of a portable device or accidental deletion - resulting in anguished calls to the IT department.
"The research also showed that well-intentioned company policies on how to store and manage company information are not always getting through to the workforce.
“The survey revealed that around a quarter (23%) of office workers are unaware or not very aware of their organisation’s data management policies, leaving the company vulnerable to damaging data breaches and security infringements.
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