A sickness haunts the modern office, and it’s hasn’t come from whatever everybody’s kids incubated over half-term or the latest hashtag-stuffed tenuously-news-based #insight dribbling out of LinkedIn. The plague lies deeper, in your filing system. New research by YouGov for Workiro reveals the humble folder as a pervasive and far-reaching plague: one of inefficiency, frustration, wasted time and lost revenue, continually spreading inside and outside your organisation. Overstuffed My Documents and Sharepoint folders aren’t just cluttered, they’re contagious. Each new folder multiplies the mess, demanding still more manual work to contain the spread. 

The problem is that folders group information outside of the tools people use every day, with each program and each user creating systems that don’t sync up without expensive manual effort. The impact is laid bare in the study Folders, Files & Failure: The Productivity Paradox. Over half of the managers surveyed said that cross-department collaboration was stymied by key tools not having access to the latest information. 60% said that different systems for CRM, ERP, accounts and email served as disconnected silos that disrupt workflows and prevent collaboration. A whopping 65% said their tools made it impossible to have a clear view on what was going on, leading to wasted time and money pulling things together. If you find yourself thinking it shouldn’t be this hard to work together, you’re not alone. 

The folder plague is bad enough when working with co-workers you share systems, policies and (supposedly) motivation with. If you have to introduce clients or suppliers then symptoms get much worse - introducing a new collection of platforms, policies and opaque approval processes that drag things out even further. Something as simple as getting feedback on a PDF, or getting a contract signed, spawns a series of new files and versions, each with their own filing requirements, and each new filename making it that bit more difficult to find the latest version next time you need it in a hurry. 

These are problems that folders feed, rather than solve. It can be tempting to think that you can turn them to your own ends, but - as noted productivity consultant Spider-Man has taught us - you can’t engage the darkness without being corrupted by it, in this case being trapped in a web of elaborately-titled and inevitably under-used filing systems that are doomed to slide into disuse.

The cure for this plague is to stop trying to wedge projects into outdated systems, and instead be lead by the projects themselves. You need to focus on your needs and those of your team, and the ideal information flow that would support them. And you need to kick the folder habit once and for all, before the plague spreads any further.

This is the workflow that Workiro delivers. Instead of looking at folders, you have central document storage that you view by project, and track the key files, edits and approvals from a single central interface in NetSuite. Integrated Office365 collaboration means you can edit and comment on Word, Excel and Powerpoint docs directly, maintaining a single version rather than racking up different copies, with the certainty that everybody has the right version at all times. Emails about each project are automatically captured and tagged from within Outlook, and can be viewed centrally; PDFs can be commented on and stored from the same view, contracts can be digitally signed and centrally stored in a single version. Crucially, nobody’s creating any folders - the files are accessible directly from within each platform, be that NetSuite, Salesforce or Office365.

Does that sound like a cure you could benefit from? You can find out more about the folder plague in our study, and how Workiro works to solve it in our recent webinar. If you’d like to talk more about how Workiro can help your business, contact one of our specialists.