What's the ROI of Your Employee Directory Tool?

The ROI of an employee directory is hard to measure.

That's because every employee search has a relatively small impact that's spread across a large number of people over a long period of time.

When your teams are searching for people hundreds of times a day, which is quite typical in most mid-sized organizations, there's a lot of time wasted if you're using an inefficient directory solution.

Research from McKinsey shows that the average worker spends "nearly 20 percent of their time tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks."

In other words, the average employee spends 1 out of every 5 work days just searching for people!

That's valuable time that should instead be going to meaningful work. Like helping your customers, and working towards your company's goals.

A 2018 Panopto study of 1,001 American employees (I wonder who that last person was 🤔) across a variety of industries found that employees spend an average of 5 hours every week waiting to get in touch with people that have the unique knowledge they need.

Interestingly, 20 percent of workers reported duplicating the work of others because they’d been unable to reach the colleague in question.

What a waste of time.

Can an Employee Directory Solve These Issues?

Not all of them, of course.

Workplace communication is a big topic and an employee directory solves one part of that: the "connecting people" part.

What we know is that making it easier to find people saves real time and real money. But the tool is only half of it — the data underneath has to exist first. In OneDirectory's tenant analysis, Microsoft 365 profile fields average just 30.8% complete, and the Manager field is completed in only 42% of profiles. Those are opening figures. See where those same tenants ended up after the cleanup work. That's the actual starting line for most companies: before a directory can pay for itself, it has to close a 69-point data gap.