Stop Wasting Time Searching for Files

“According to a McKinsey report, employees spend 1.8 hours every day—9.3 hours per week, on average—searching and gathering information. Put another way, businesses hire 5 employees but only 4 show up to work; the fifth is off searching for answers, but not contributing any value.” Source: Time Searching for Information.

How much time do you spend in your week searching for the information you need to do your job effectively? Without a good organization file organization, employees can spend a scary amount of time simply looking information, rather than putting that information to good use.

At PTG, we use Sharepoint to organize our company files. There are multiple ways to organize your files on Sharepoint - our favorite is Enterprise Key Terms.

Every time you upload or create a document you have the opportunity to ‘tag’ it as a specific (or multiple) classifications. These key terms are customizable -- so you can use the terms your business already uses. Some of the classifications we’ve set up for clients include: keywords (general information, product description, how-to), departments (Marketing, IT, Admin), and project based (Project 1, Company A, Phase 3).

At PTG, we organize our files by department -- every document we upload to SharePoint is classified as Sales, Services, or Marketing. We have sub classifications to organize files within these departments. A few examples:

• If a file is tagged as Services, we can also choose whether it belongs to the Blue Team, the Green Team, or the Projects Team.
• Our Marketing is classified both by year and by quarter (Q1, Q2, Q3, or Q4).
• Our Sales documents are classified by what type of document it is (Proposal, Scope of Work, or Signed Agreement).

Classifying our files like this makes it much, much easier to find them later. Using enterprise key terms on Sharepoint has saved us countless hours of employee time. It doesn’t matter who uploaded a file - anyone in our company can go find it later. That means if our office manager has a question about a service agreement, she can go directly to Sharepoint to find out without having to go through the sales team. A team member covering for someone one else while they’re out office can find the files they need without having to interrupt a vacation. And most importantly – our employees are spending more time being productive and less time searching for a file.