Does your team spend more time looking for information than working? Here's why

Try asking your team a simple question tomorrow morning: "where do you find the information you need to do your work?". The most common answers are almost always the same: "it depends, I send it by email", "there's a shared folder but I'm not sure it's up to date", "I have to ask Marco, he knows where it is".

If you recognise this scenario, every day you're losing a huge amount of productivity, probably without having quantified it yet. According to McKinsey, knowledge workers spend on average 20–30% of the working day looking for information: in a team of 10 people, that means 2–3 people producing nothing concrete every day.

The problem isn't the team, it's how information is organised

In the companies we work with we almost always find the same pattern: the information exists, but it's fragmented across four or five different places. Important decisions stay in emails no one else knows about, procedures live in a Word document on someone's desktop, sales data in an Excel file only one person can read. It's not a discipline problem: it's a structural one, information silos, and it's solved with a structural intervention, not an internal memo.

The 4 symptoms we recognise immediately

• Every meeting starts with 10 minutes of "getting aligned": the status of the work is never visible to everyone in real time.
• There are "indispensable" people: if someone goes on holiday and the company slows down, information lives in people's heads, not in the systems.
• Decisions are made without up-to-date data: reports are prepared by hand and arrive already partly obsolete.
• New hires take months to become operational: onboarding is "shadowing someone", not a knowledge system.

How it's solved

When we tackle this problem with a client we always start from three questions: where the most time is lost today (20–30 minutes of observing the real flows is enough to find out), what information is needed by whom and when, and which tool fits the way the company works, not the other way round. The most common mistake is adopting powerful tools without adapting them to your context: the result is one more tool to manage, not a solution.

A client in the manufacturing sector cut the time spent on internal status updates by 60% in six weeks, without introducing any new technology: simply by reorganising what they already had.