A recent study by Lucid Software highlights a huge productivity drain in UK workplaces: over half of employees (53%) spend up to two hours each day just trying to locate essential information. This daily scramble adds up to 520 hours per worker yearly, equivalent to roughly £12,900 in lost productivity per person.
The survey, which polled over 2,000 knowledge workers, shows the disarray and inefficiency across organisations. Almost 44% of respondents admitted to missing key work goals due to insufficient access to information, while nearly a third (31%) said projects often falter or fail because critical details are missing.
Redundancy is another issue. Over a third (34%) of workers recreate documents or processes daily because they can’t easily access existing ones, revealing how poor information management tends to hinder operational efficiency.
What is the solution?
When asked what could help, 48% of workers said that standardising workflows and documentation could reclaim up to 10 hours every week. But major hurdles stand in the way. Technical limitations topped the list of challenges (44%), followed closely by the difficulty of aligning compliance with daily operations (43%), and uneven enforcement of procedures across teams (42%).
In addition, meetings are another productivity black hole. More than four in 10 workers (41%) said it can take up to three hours just to reach an agreement within a team on what tasks they should complete. Meanwhile, 37% leave meetings unclear about their next steps, and 47% said their teams often lack alignment altogether.
Tool overload is also a culprit. Almost a third of employees (29%) juggle between six and ten different platforms or software tools each day, with 24% citing the sheer number of systems to check as a major barrier to finding what they need.
Dan Lawyer, Lucid Software’s chief product officer, summed up the problem bluntly: “In fast-paced work environments, clarity isn’t optional. When employees are stuck chasing down simple information, productivity stalls and progress suffers.”