Is Your Team Spending More Time Looking for Information Than Actually Working?
- Roberto Benanti
- Mar 9
- 3 min read
Updated: Mar 21
Ask your team a simple question tomorrow morning: “Where do you find the information you need to do your job?”
The answers you’ll hear are probably these: “Depends, I’ll send you an email.” “There’s a shared folder somewhere, but I’m not sure it’s up to date.” “You’ll have to ask Marco, he knows where it is.”
If this sounds familiar, you’re losing an enormous amount of productivity every single day, and you probably haven’t quantified it yet.
According to McKinsey, knowledge workers spend an average of 20-30% of their working day searching for information. In a team of 10, that means 2-3 people producing nothing concrete every single day.
The problem isn’t your team. It’s how information is organized.
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. Emails contain important decisions that nobody else knows about. Operating procedures live in a Word document on someone’s desktop. Sales data sits in an Excel sheet that only one person knows how to read.
This isn’t a discipline problem or a matter of people not being good enough. It’s a structural problem, and it has a precise name: information silos. And like any structural problem, it requires a structural fix, not an internal memo.
The 4 warning signs we spot immediately when we walk into a company
Over time, we’ve learned to quickly identify companies where this problem is critical. Here are the four most common signals:
Every meeting starts with a 10-minute “alignment.” If every meeting kicks off with “so, where are we at?”, it means work status is never visible to everyone in real time.
There are “indispensable” people who hold information. If the company slows down when one person goes on holiday or gets sick, the information lives in people’s heads, not in your systems.
Decisions are made without up-to-date data. Reports are prepared manually, take hours, and by the time they reach management they’re already partially outdated.
New hires take months to become productive. If onboarding only works by “shadowing someone,” you don’t have a knowledge system: you have an oral tradition.
How we fix it: the approach we use with our clients
There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but there is a method. When we address this problem with a client, we always start from three questions:
1. Where is the most time being lost right now? We map real workflows: not the ones in the manual, but the ones people actually use every day. Bottlenecks almost always surface within 20-30 minutes of observation.
2. What information needs to be accessible to whom, and when? Not everyone needs everything. Precisely defining who needs to see what is the prerequisite for building a system that works without creating information overload.
3. Which tool adapts to your way of working (and not the other way around)? The most common problem we see is companies adopting powerful tools without configuring them for their context. The result is one more tool to manage, instead of a solution.
A client in the manufacturing sector reduced the time spent on internal status updates by 60% in six weeks. We didn’t introduce any new technology: we simply reorganised the tools they already had.
Where to start this week
If you want to quickly understand how much this problem is costing your company, try this exercise: ask three people on your team to track for two days every time they look for information and don’t find it on the first try. The results will surprise you.
Then ask yourself: is this a problem I want to keep ignoring, or is it time to address it?
Want to find out where the problem is hiding in your company?
At SBK Solutions, we help companies analyse their processes and implement concrete solutions. We don’t sell software: we help organisations work better with the right tools, configured the right way.
Or keep reading in the Digital Transformation category.
