Employee directory

This is the employee directory sheet, and it answers the question nobody asks until somebody complains: what is the out-of-date directory costing? Enter the people in it, the fields a profile carries, the share of profiles that are complete, how often a person looks somebody up, how long a lookup takes without a directory, the average hourly cost, and the joiners, leavers and movers a year with the minutes each takes to record. It returns the profiles missing something, the empty fields, the lookups a month, the hours and the money they cost, and the upkeep hours the changes actually need. The gap between those last two figures is the argument.

What the lookup costs

140 people looking somebody up three times a week is 1,820 lookups a month. At four minutes each that is 121 hours, and at a $34 hourly cost about $4,125 a month or $49,504 a year, which works out at roughly $354 per person per year of hunting for a colleague's details.

What is missing, per field

Nine fields on a profile and 62% of profiles complete leaves 53 people with a gap and 478 empty fields. That is a list somebody can work through in an afternoon, which is the point of printing it: incompleteness is a task, not a mood.

What upkeep actually takes

Twenty-eight joiners, leavers and movers a year at six minutes each is under three hours. Against $49,504 of lookup cost, the maintenance is not the expensive part; not doing it is.