How Much Time Do Your Employees Spend Searching For Information?

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When you add up all the time employees spend searching for information, it can be staggering. In some organizations, workers may spend as much as 20% of their time looking for information. And that’s not even the entire picture. When you factor in other time spent on routine tasks like copying documents or emailing files, the time spent searching for information can climb even higher. Why is this so common? Because knowledge workers have too many fragmented sources of information with no overarching structure to make it easy to find what they need. With so much focus on digital transformation and omnichannel customer experiences, it may seem like there isn’t enough time to also tackle all these challenges related to employee knowledge management, but that’s exactly why you must do both things at once.

What is knowledge management?

The process of capturing and organizing information that individuals or teams need to do their jobs well. This might include customer data and records, employee training materials, sales analytics, product information, legal compliance data, and much more. The goal is to make it easy for employees to quickly find what they need and have it be formatted in a way that makes sense for them. Without a strong knowledge management system in place, employees may have to go through too many layers to find what they need. Or they may simply not know where to begin their search. They might also run into information that is out of date or no longer relevant, which creates a significant barrier to productivity.

Why does knowledge management matter to employee productivity?

When employees have to spend time searching for information, it can lead to increased errors and productivity losses, as well as a poor customer experience. At an organizational level, the cumulative time spent looking for information can add up to a significant loss of productivity. If a customer calls an employee who has to spend half an hour looking up the answer, this creates a subpar customer experience that can drive that individual to switch to a competitor. If an employee is trying to finish a project and they can’t locate the data they need, they will likely have to push the timeline back. This kind of resourcing issue can have a cascading effect that negatively impacts other projects. If an employee has to copy and paste information from one document to another, there is a high risk for error, which can increase the cost of doing business.

The costs of poor knowledge management

- Lost productivity: When employees spend time looking for information, it takes away from their ability to do their jobs. This can add up to a significant loss of productivity. - Customer experience: An employee who spends 30 minutes looking for an answer to a customer’s question creates a subpar customer experience, which can drive the customer to switch to a competitor. - Productivity losses due to inaccurate data: If employees are copying and pasting information from one document to another and making mistakes, this increases the cost of doing business. - Data security breaches: When employees are storing sensitive data in emails or other unsecured formats, they risk a data breach, which can lead to significant fines and reputational damage. - Frustration and burnout: When employees are spending too much time looking for information, they can get frustrated and end up feeling overworked. This can lead to burnout, which can have a negative impact on productivity and employee engagement. - Increased risk of fraud: When employees have access to sensitive information and they make the wrong decisions because they don’t have access to that information, it can lead to fraud and other costly errors.

Investing in the foundation for knowledge management

There are many small changes you can make that will significantly improve the state of your knowledge management system. These investments can reap massive rewards down the road as your employees begin to feel the benefits of an easy-to-use knowledge management system. - Standardize the format for key documents. - Centralize employee training materials. - Clarify your organization’s information governance policies. - Make data analytics easily accessible across departments. - Invest in technology to automate mundane tasks like data entry. - Identify knowledge experts within your team and create mentorship programs. - Create a knowledge-capture process that helps employees document what they learn and where they find it. - Review your knowledge management system on an ongoing basis to identify areas of improvement.

Knowledge-sharing tools like HapPhi to facilitate organizational knowledge management

These tools help employees share information with their teams, collaborate around documents, and find the information they need. They also help you manage compliance-related information and keep sensitive data secure. HapPhi, a knowledge management solution, is the best choice for companies that want to improve the way they share knowledge across their departments and with customers. HapPhi helps your team create an online knowledge hub where they can centrally store and organize content, like documents, images, videos, and webpages. They can also use HapPhi to collaborate around this content, as well as find what they need when they need it. HapPhi also offers regulatory compliance features that make it easier to store and secure your sensitive data.

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