How much time do you and your employees spend each day searching for documents?
Is it 30 minutes a day? An hour? Does it affect your concentration or your productivity?
Disorganization and inconsistent or unclear protocols can frustrate the entire office. They also waste time. Think about it. If there are approximately 250 workdays in a year, and you’re wasting 30 minutes a day, that’s 125 hours a year. Five days of your life each year spent looking for files? The thing is, it’s more than 30 minutes a day, isn’t it?
Do you have a system?
Storing files and editing and sharing documents randomly, with no organization, can change any file search to a quest for the holy grail. Even knowing the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow won’t help. Instead of slogging through each employee’s personal filing and file naming system (Remember that file called ‘Important’?), why not have a system in place for everyone? And why not make it as easy to use as it is to remember your favorite color. Blue! No, yellow! You may think this is a small matter and hardly worth your time, but perhaps these numbers will convince you.
How much money do you lose looking for things?
Using the earlier model, we can also see how much money your company spends when you have no well-organized systems in place.
Basing the calculations on that same 30 minutes a day, if you make $45k per year, that’s roughly $22 an hour, which means the company is spending $11 a day on your quest for that missing file. That’s $55 a week and $236.50 a month. Now how many people work for your company? Are they as good at finding documents as you are? For every 100 employees, many of whom make more than $45k , you’re spending at least $5,500 a week or $23,650 a month or $283,800 a year—to stumble around in a virtual filing cabinet.
What if there were a way to get those days and dollars back?
For the sake of this example I chose low numbers. You are statistically likely to spend far more than 30 minutes a day searching for documents and you probably make more than $22 an hour. Now multiply those numbers to encompass every member of your team. It’s shocking how quickly the wasted time and money add up.
But what if you could dramatically reduce that time, while increasing productivity. There’s no way to eliminate these tasks completely, but decreasing the amount of time wasted by 66% or 20 minutes a day would save 82.5 hours and $187,308 a year.
Beyond just the dollars saved, you’ll cut down on the frustration everyone experiences and inject some much-needed sanity into their lives.
You can apply this algorithm to other processes, too. So just ask yourself where is your company hitting bottlenecks and losing money? That’s what having a system—a consistent, reliable, and repeatable system of protocols can do for you. It can save you time and money. Do I have your attention?
Working in Microsoft Teams to collaborate across people, organizations and platforms can make your entire organization more efficient. Using its powerful file organization, customizable search and the web building capabilities of SharePoint, the platform that underlies Teams, streamlines that work. And the powerful Skype for Business-like Teams communication platform brings it all together.