Folders are costing your business £193k a year

“Seeking efficiencies” and costs to cut is one of the great business traditions, a ceaseless quest for every enterprise save for those blessed with blank-cheque funding. For the rest of us, it's at best an annual, often quarterly chore in which the year-end crunch is made worse or the New Year is made to feel considerably less new by rehashing the same old arguments about whether your organisation really needs branded snacks/offsite team socials/laptops made in the last decade (delete as appropriate).

Despite being endlessly repeated, this process overlooks some much simpler cost-savings that are hiding in plain sight - and would be much more welcomed by staff. Recent research carried out by YouGov for Workiro shows that over half of UK business leaders say they burn time just finding the information they need to do their job - a foundational problem with potentially transformational impact.

56% of respondents said that their productivity suffered because they spend too much time searching for files, emails and project updates, and 58% said that projects are routinely delayed waiting for documents to be signed off. And that was just the projects that were already in progress - almost a third of respondents said that their business had missed revenue opportunities because staff couldn’t get their hands on information in time.

The mental image that this suggests is something from another age, like the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark - although in practice it’s not dusty crates but an endless series of folders, most of which are empty or contain files that are three versions out of date. The file you need for that call in ten minutes is not in the grandly titled “Q2 projections” folder on the server, which contains nothing but artefacts of a hopelessly idealistic kickoff session three months ago, but on somebody else’s desktop called “tues meeting FINAL”. 

If staff are losing a mere 30 minutes per day on this sort of fruitless hunt - which feels like a generous underestimation, when you can spend just that swearing at a single Sharepoint interface - that suggests a 100-person company is burning at least £142,000 a year at UK average salaries, and probably even more when you consider that it’s senior and management roles facing these problems.

The insights are supported by previous research conducted by IDC which indicated that breaking down digital silos could bring huge financial benefits, with surveyed business leaders projecting a 36% increase in revenue and 30% reduction in costs. 

The solution is to stop using folders entirely. They’re an artefact of a different era, and totally unsuited to modern knowledge work. Workiro does away with them in favour of single, central files - automatically named and organised by our built-in AI tool, which ensures they’re consistently labelled, organised and accessible to all relevant users directly within the platforms they’re using, be that NetSuite, Salesforce, Outlook or other core systems. 

Financial documents can be centrally maintained, with the latest version always available and prior edits clearly viewed. Contracts and approvals can be tracked from creator, to customer, to approval and back again, all with the same filename. And everything - including emails - is grouped by project, so you can see at a glance what’s happening, what’s happened, and what you need to do. It’s all grouped together in a single window in your platform of choice - which can be Workiro, or within your existing CRM or ERP like NetSuite, Salesforce or HubSpot. Workiro is engineered to work with the tools you already have and to save you switching between them, so you can use it to bring data together in a view that suits your workflow - and leave comments or even live chat right there in the interface. 

If you’d like a more personal demonstration of Workiro can deliver efficiencies to your business and start saving you money, contact one of our specialists today.

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