Do you think crappy workplace practises cost your organisation money? If so, you will not be surprised by the results of a new survey from Oracle Research that found inefficient storage and working practices are costing UK companies up to £900 million a week.

Oracle claims the research revealed that the equivalent of 30 million hours a week is wasted as people struggle to locate disparately stored documents, and share up-to-date information across systems.

According to the research, the average employee uses more than five different applications at work on a weekly basis. The use of separate applications in this way means that workers are spending over an hour every week copying and pasting the same information between documents stored in different places and programmes, rather than using a centralised system that can pull together information from wherever it is stored in the business.

The study, entitled “Enterprise 2.0: Driving creativity, productivity and collaboration” involved a survey of 2,000 adults in the UK.

Its conclusions were as follows:
The average worker spends over an hour (61.55 minutes) a week locating documents or files either from e-mail, personal folders or in the company / shared file servers;
People waste 74 minutes a week copying, pasting and re-entering the same information into different documents;
80% of workers use their e-mail to store information and files;
96% are open to the introduction of new technologies to help make their working practices more efficient;
In the past, 44% found insufficient training was a barrier to adopting these new technologies, while one third (35%) did not find them simple or intuitive to use; and
40% of social network users say they are easier to use than workplace software.

Andrew Gilboy, Vice President Director E2.0, Oracle, said, “The findings highlight that while employees are keen to work with Enterprise 2.0 tools in their everyday activities, businesses are yet to take advantage of this and implement them on a wide scale. The real opportunity missed by not adopting Enterprise 2.0 is the ‘business productivity’ gains – as opposed to the gains that can be made in personal productivity – and the ability to accelerate business models.”