Office Workers Struggle to Find Files

British office workers struggle to find important files they thought they had saved on their work computer, according to a new poll. The Iron Mountain-commissioned YouGov research finds that 58 percent of office workers have had difficulty locating such files. With some 60 percent of company data now being kept on PCs and laptops, looking for lost or deleted files is a costing businesses in terms of lost staff time and IT resources. It can also impact negatively on staff morale.

A study that the Butler Group found that 10 percent of a company’s salary costs and a quarter of staff time can be taken up by employees looking for information. For a company of 250 employees, this represents up to 2,300 working hours a week – or just under two hours a day per employee. This equates to a potential cost of £700,000 per year.

Says Richard Ellis, sales director at Iron Mountain Digital., “Looking for documents can be extremely frustrating for employees as well as damaging for the business. With more and more employees working remotely on laptops and struggling to deal with an ever-growing quantity of information, it is inevitable that documents will get lost – the consequence of a hard drive failure, the theft of a portable device or accidental deletion – resulting in anguished calls to the IT department.

“The survey revealed that around a quarter (23 per cent) of office workers are unaware or not very aware of their organisation’s data management policies, leaving the company vulnerable to damaging data breaches and security infringements. Having a professional and efficient data backup solution in place for business computers means that firms can implement these policies without having to rely on individual employees.”