More than half of workers (53%) waste up to two hours a day simply trying to find information critical to getting their job done.

In all, UK workers waste up to 520 hours a year searching for information – the equivalent of £12,900 of their salary, the poll of more than 2,000 knowledge workers by software firm Lucid has argued.

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More than four in 10 UK workers (44%) also complained of missing objectives at work because of information gaps.

Similarly, 31% believed projects regularly missed deadlines or failed to meet company objectives because of missing details.

Recreating processes or documentation because of difficulty accessing the original information happens daily, according to 34% of UK workers, highlighting significant operational inefficiency, said Lucid.

As a result, almost half (48%) of workers believe standardising these processes could save them up to 10 hours each week.

According to 44% of workers, technical and system limitations are the leading barrier, followed by balancing process compliance with other business priorities (43%), and ensuring consistent enforcement across the organisation (42%).

Time wasted in or around meetings was another common bugbear, with 41% of UK workers saying it could take up to three hours to form a team consensus around what work needed to be done.

More than a third (37%) commonly left meetings unsure of what they were expected to do next. As a result, 47% stated that their project teams lack alignment.

Too many different tools that slow collaboration and decision-making was a further issue. Nearly a third (29%) of those polled said they used between six and 10 tools or products daily at work. Yet 24% believed having too many systems to check was their biggest challenge when searching for information work.

Dan Lawyer, chief product officer at Lucid Software, said: “In today’s fast-moving workplace, clarity can’t be optional. Workers are spending too much time searching for basic information needed to do their job which is crippling productivity and making it more difficult to move projects forward,” he added.

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