A deadline is approaching, but the file or information you need is nowhere to be found. You frantically manually search through file shares and other repositories for it, to no avail. You begin to panic as you realize you have no clue where the document may be.

This is an all-too-common scenario. Finding the right information at the right time isn’t a new problem, but it is one that has gotten increasingly worse in recent years. In fact, according to this report conducted by Zapier in 2021, 73 percent of workers spend an average of 1-3 hours a day just trying to find information or a particular document. 

That is an astounding amount of time not spent on core job functions.

So why is it so hard for employees to find the information they need? 

There are a few reasons for this: 

• Exponential Data Growth: Companies are creating data faster than their ability to manage it and it is only going to continue to grow exponentially (in volume and complexity). 
• Poor Data Understanding: Most organizations don’t have a good understanding of their information, making it all too easy for business-critical information to be hidden away in desktops, file shares or other repositories. 
• Disconnected Data: Siloed or hard-to-access information is a common reason why you may be struggling to get what you need. 

No matter the reason, looking for files and documents is a huge waste of time that takes away from other important work, and time really is money. Allow us to elaborate…

Let’s demonstrate the cost of spending hours searching for unfindable documents. Keeping it simple, let’s assume you have 30 people on your team each earning $80,000 (including all employee expenses, not just compensation). Let’s also assume that each person works a normal 40 hours a week. 

If each person spends roughly 1.5 hours every day looking for information, that means they are spending 18.75% of their week just searching for needed files or documents. And if this is true for all 30 team members, that would cost the company a whopping $450,000 per year.

Do these hidden costs surprise you? If you want to make searching for information easier at your organization, Shinydocs can help! Our advanced search capabilities can help you and your organization find what you need, wherever it lives in your organization.