The foundational - and fatally flawed - promise of the digital office is that it’s better than doing things on paper. You don’t need to refer to filing cabinets or carbon copies, everything is stored digitally and findable instantly. And yet, you can’t - we’ve traded the sluggish reliability of physical cabinets for sprawling, infinite dumping grounds that spread across servers, platforms, emails and devices, a world in which everything is available but you don’t know exactly where it is - or at least, where the latest version is. Digital files have turned out to be not a cure, but a brand new malaise.

This is, crushingly, the modern condition. The information is definitely out there…you just can’t find it, and you have to waste precious time digging it out. Even Google has dropped the ball, as you’ll know if you’ve tried looking for something that isn’t an overconfident AI reply or ruthlessly optimised landing page for a company in another county that doesn’t do what you need (try DuckDuckGo if you need a change, it’s amazing the difference that it makes).

Google at least has the excuse that it’s trying to search the entire internet. But if you’re just looking in your own company’s files, there is no simply no reason you shouldn’t be able to find what you need in less than a minute. And that should be all the information you need, not just the two files still at the top of the Sharepoint folder from this week’s meeting.  

The problems persist in every organisation. The latest version ends up on your desktop rather than the server; the client update is in a Teams DM and not the project overview; that final contract amend is in an email and not made to the file that actually went off to be signed - and actually, the client sent back a different version anyway that won’t get noticed until the audit. These are the tiny frustrations that amass into workplace unhappiness and worse, lost business - late replies, inaccurate reports, and awkward mid-meeting moments when you find yourself unable to give the right answer damage client relationships.

Recent research by YouGov and Workiro revealed that over half of UK managers struggle to find the information they need to simply get an overview of a project, and almost a third have seen their organisation lose business as a result. Any good manager knows that you can’t make good decisions without knowing the full picture, and every employee deserves a workplace where they don’t have to engage in daily battles to do their job. If it takes more than two minutes to find the files you need - the right version of the files you need, not the ones that don’t have this month’s data in them - then you’ve failed and so has your business.

The cause of all this is the thing that we brought with us from the olden days, and unwittingly holds us back: the folders and filing systems that our workflows are built on. As revealed by our own Ben Oliver in our latest webinar, The Folder Illusion, folders are the enemy inside your business.

Folders actively make it difficult to find stuff. They promise order but they can’t deliver it, because every app uses them slightly differently and so, routinely, do your co-workers - and there’s no IT naming policy or stropping all-hands email that will ever be able to fix that. When you have people bouncing between Outlook and NetSuite, SalesForce and Adobe Acrobat, Slack and email or smartphone and laptop, files are always going to get lost. 

There is a fix for this, and you don’t need to enact draconian IT policies or change your core workflows to do it. You simply need to ditch the folders, and move to a truly modern solution. With Workiro, you can view files directly within NetSuite, you can automatically tag relevant emails and assign them to a project without leaving Outlook365, you’re always synced to the latest updates in Salesforce. Everything is tagged, updated and accessible instantly, to the whole team, with a central compliance-friendly audit trail. 

Ditching folders gives back time to everybody in the organisation, and the impact is dramatic - just ask our existing customers. To find out the difference Workiro can make to your business, set up a call with one of our specialists today.