The half of the workers spend two hours per day searching for things

Over half of employees (53%) spend up to two hours per day trying to locate information that is critical to their work.

The survey of over 2,000 knowledge workers conducted by Lucid software found that UK workers spend up to 520 working hours per year looking for information. This is the equivalent of PS12900 in their salaries.

Information gaps also caused four out of ten UK workers (44%) to miss their work objectives.

31% of respondents believed that projects were regularly late or did not meet the company’s objectives due to missing details.

According to Lucid, 34% of UK employees report that they recreate processes or documents because it is difficult to access the original information. This represents a significant operational inefficiency.

Nearly half of the workers (48%) believe that standardising their processes could help them save up to 10 working hours per week.

According to 44%, the biggest barrier is the lack of technical or system support. This is followed by the need to balance process compliance with business priorities (43%), as well as ensuring that the same enforcement standards are applied across the organization (42%).

Meetings and the time wasted therein were another common complaint. 41% of UK employees said it could take three hours for a team to reach consensus on what needs to be done.

Over a third of attendees (37%) often leave meetings not knowing what to do next. In turn, 47% of respondents said that their project teams are not aligned.

Another issue was the use of too many tools, which slowed down collaboration and decision making. Nearly one third (29%) said that they use between six and ten tools or products every day at work. 24 % of respondents said that having to check too many different systems was the biggest obstacle they faced when looking for information.

Dan Lawyer, Chief Product Officer at Lucid Software said: “In the fast-paced workplace of today, clarity is not optional.” “Workers are spending far too much time looking for the basic information they need to perform their jobs, which cripples productivity and makes it difficult to move forward projects,” Dan Lawyer added.

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