reliable search functionality

Digital Employee Experience, Intranets

5 Reasons Why You Need Reliable Search Functionality

Considering the overwhelming flow of data, information overload is inevitable in today’s age and time. Therefore, businesses need to understand the importance of reliable search functionality in their Intranets, especially in terms of project management and employee collaboration.

Suppose an employee wants to search for a company policy, but they don’t know its exact name. How long will it take the individual to find that particular document? Does your intranet have appropriate search provisions for such cases?

Did you know: It takes about 8 searches to find something

reliable search functionality

Unfortunately, most businesses lack reliable search functionality. That’s why workers are taking about eight searches to locate the right information, according to a SearchYourCloud survey.

More searches mean more time needed to find a document, which equates to lower productivity and more wasted time – not the recipe for success indeed.

That’s why it’s important to have reliable search functionality in your intranet.

Why Do You Need Reliable Search Functionality?

Your employees need to search for information on a regular basis. Thus, they’re spending a certain amount of their daily time looking for data.

Now, it’s up to the reliability of the search function to determine how much time an individual needs to look for a certain piece of information.

A McKinsey report showed that workers take around 1.8 hours every single day gathering and searching information. That’s about 9.3 hours a week. Think of everything an employee can do in these hours.

Let’s look at it from another perspective. Considering the number of time employees take to search for information, businesses might hire five employees, but only four of them are actually working. The fifth is busy looking for information.

So, it’s evident that you need reliable search functionality to improve productivity in the workplace. Here are some reasons you should work on updating the search functionality.

1. Better Search Results 

When an employee searches for news, conversation, or documents, they want to find relevant information. However, if your search functionality is lacking in precision, the individual will get a number of search results instead of a singular one.

Better search results

On the other hand, reliable search functionality will land the searcher onto the appropriate bit of information, removing any ambiguity. Moreover, it will give precise search results, letting the employee preview the exact document or information they were looking for.

2. Saves Time

As already discussed, document searching eats up a lot of time in the workplace. Instead, this time could be spent on something more fruitful and productive only if the search functionality was more straightforward, dependable, and precise.

Therefore, if you enhance your search functionality, it will ensure that employees find what they’re looking for in the first search rather than running the search eight times. So, they can spend all the saved time working on their projects and meeting the deadlines more promptly.

3. Saves Money

The saying ‘time is money’ is quite literal in the business world. The more time you waste, the more money you lose. In fact, a European study showed that looking for information actually wastes money in the long run.

If you have worked out a revenue per day system for your company, you would know how much money you’re losing a year.

However, with reliable search functionality, you can save all this money and improve the generated revenue.

4. Improves Productivity

If your employees are spending an hour or two of their day searching for information, they’re bound to be less productive than a workforce that can locate information in a single search.

Therefore, if you want to improve productivity in the workplace, you need to work on the search capabilities.

analysis bullseye

5. Enhances Employee Experience

It’s very important to focus on employee experience today because many organizations are finding it difficult to retain the workforce. It makes sense for an employee to feel frustrated or annoyed because they can’t seem to find a simple piece of information.

On the other hand, with reliable search functionality, your employees will have a better experience because they can instantly find what they are looking for.

How To Improve Your Search Functionality?

One of the major reasons for employees taking too long to search for relevant information is the absence of reliable search functionality.

Thus, it’s about time you take some measures to improve this.

How to improve search functionality

For instance, you can leverage SharePoint’s search functionality in the workplace. Besides allowing employees to find relevant business information, it also lets them search for appropriate conversations, the latest updates, resources, and much more.

Make Room For Typos

When locating information, employees are often prone to making typos, especially if they’re searching for generic information. So, make sure there’s flexibility in your search functionality for misspelled words.

Boost Common Search Terms

Get insights into what your employees are abundantly searching for. Make these terms and documents easier to find so that the user experience gets better. For example use term sets, term stores etc.

However, do note that you’ll have to update these terms from time to time.

Recognize Similar Terms

Sometimes, the searcher might not know the industry jargon or the correct term for what they’re searching for. So, make sure the search functionality has provisions for alternate terms, synonyms, and related words.

In this way, it will be easier for the employees to find the relevant information even if they’re not exactly sure about what to search for.

Homophones

People often make mistakes when searching for homophones since they sound the same but are spelt differently. Incorporate homophone suggestions in the search results to eliminate this problem.

The Ultimate Document Management Guide

Document Management Guide

Conclusion

As shown by research and surveys, document searching seems to be taking up a lot of time in the workforce. Additionally, it causes monetary loss, too, since employees are wasting time searching for information rather than actually doing their jobs productively.

You can eradicate this limitation from your workplace by integrating reliable search functionality. In this way, you will improve user experience, boost productivity, and avoid the financial loss that comes as an ugly by-product of document searching.

SharePoint offers the best search experience