New Survey from Elastic Shows Finding Business-Critical Content is a Significant Problem in a Remote Work Environment

The survey of 1,000 U.S.-based office professionals, conducted by Wakefield Research on behalf of Elastic, found that 60% of respondents spend more time digging for documents than they do replying to messages or emails. This staggering percentage highlights one of the most common issues that America’s professional workforce faces: Where is that file?

As employees adjust to blended work environments, or shift completely to full-time work-from-home positions, they’re forced to reconcile their file management issues. In fact, nearly 50% of survey respondents said they’d rather have all their files organized than have a dedicated workspace in their home.

The need for better business content management also adds to employees’ daily stressors. Survey data showed that 81% of respondents had a hard time finding documents when a boss or client put them in the hot seat, and 1 in 3 (33%) survey respondents said they frequently have issues finding the documents they need when asked for them.

Businesses are grappling with managing their workplace content organization and search systems. Nearly 3 in 5 survey respondents (58%) say a quick search for files and documents is a top-three problem to solve to support remote work in the future — including nearly 1 in 5 (18%) who rank it as the number one issue to solve for. And, 41% of upper management office workers say quick file search is the top problem to solve for their employees.

Learn more about the survey results and the need for a better workplace search solution in the Elastic blog and review the survey data infographic here.

Supporting Quote:

• “Much of the professional workforce has settled into the work-from-home or hybrid working lifestyle and employees are leveraging the multitude of workplace applications needed to get their jobs done every day,” said Matt Riley, VP, Product Management, Elastic. “Industry research reveals that the average enterprise runs an incredible 200+ different SaaS tools in aggregate across departments, creating platform overload for employees looking for specific content or files. Organizations need to look to solve this growing issue as their workforce expands to become more digital and Elastic Workplace Search is the answer. It is truly the one-stop answer shop for the virtual workplace, boosting team productivity by unifying content platforms and providing the ability to search across them all, at one time.”