Employees each spend about 30 minutes a day searching for documents, a resource drain that costs businesses $3,900 per employee each year in productivity losses. That time isn't spent thumbing through file cabinets or flipping through books; instead, it's sifting through emails, clicking through computer folders and navigating the murky waters of file servers, cloud storage and shared digital workspaces.
Part of this digital clutter comes from the sheer volume of documents created daily in most offices. A uSamp survey found that respondents emailed two or more documents a day to five people for review, on average. That's 10 or so brand-new documents cluttering email inboxes and users' computers, and let's not forget the inevitable reviewer feedback and follow-up notes that these documents inspire.
Where do users typically start their search for a document? Overwhelmingly, in their email inboxes -- 76 percent of respondents said that they looked there first. Sixty-nine percent said that their computer desktop is another spot they hit while searching for documents.
Check out the full infographic below for more revelations on how employees spend time looking for digital documents.
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