Enterprises have specific challenges compared to SMBs or startups. They have thousands of employees, multiple offices, teams spread across various time zones, and a vast amount of information, processes, and procedures stored in all conceivable tools.
The losses from poor knowledge sharing alone can number in the millions for a single enterprise. Not only is costly employee time wasted, but companies that don’t effectively onboard, utilize, and engage talent face higher turnover rates, too. And high employee turnover leads to further losses.
The fix isn’t simple. Employee productivity is a very complicated issue. Everything is at play: company culture, internal processes, software, speed of innovation and technical debt, unnecessary email, pointless meetings. The list goes on.
Fortunately, there is a simple solution that — while not a cure for every productivity problem — can drastically improve knowledge sharing and finding.
Some of the world’s top companies utilize go links to help their employees find things faster so they can get their work done.
More people, more productivity problems
Did you know that knowledge workers spend about 1.8 hours every day searching for and gathering the information they need to do their work?
Just imagine what would happen if you were to reduce that amount by 30 minutes per day per employee. Then multiply that by the thousands and thousands of employees you have.
Even a small improvement in productivity can have a big impact on an enterprise organization.
The cost of low productivity
The more employees an organization has, the more costly are the effects of inefficient knowledge share.
Just take a look at these statistics from Panopto, which reveal that US-based companies with around 1000 employees lose an average of $2.7 million annually due to poor knowledge sharing, while companies with around 100,000 employees lose over $265 million annually.
What are go links and why do enterprises use them?
Go links are intuitive short links for internal company use. Here are some common example go links that you can use.
Company-wide golinks:
- go/vacation — Description of vacation benefits
- go/sop — Location of library of SOP documents
- go/hr — All HR resources
- go/it — Where to get support from IT
- go/401k — Retirement plan information and access
Team-specific golinks:
- go/weekly — Weekly team meeting access
- go/github — Team GitHub account
- go/timeline — Product launch timeline
- go/sales — All sales resources or SalesForce
With go links, companies can facilitate knowledge sharing and asset finding simply by making digital resources more intuitive.
Here are some of the top reasons why enterprise companies utilize go links.
Easy, intuitive asset finding
Go links make it easier to find what you’re looking for. You can remember previously-used go links easily, and you can even intuit go links you haven’t used before.
The easy, memorable nature of go links has a big impact on employees. When you don’t have to hunt for things, you reduce the need for context switching, especially when it comes to employees asking each other where things are.
If someone asks an employee where something is, they can share the go link without having to hunt in a folder. Even better, the need to ask gets drastically reduced because people remember for themselves.
Supporting asynchronous communication
86% of professionals say that poor communication results in workplace failures.
In today’s remote working environment, communication challenges can look a little bit different online. Communicating when no one is in the same place can be a monumental challenge.
Today’s enterprises need to support asynchronous communication — which refers to when workers are collaborating or communicating with each other at different times. This means the potential of waiting for a response to a question or request is much higher.
Even without timezone challenges, this format of communication is not only now widespread, but necessary. With ineffective meetings costing US businesses $37 billion dollars per year, asynchronous communication can help reduce unwarranted meetings.
Enterprises that utilize go/links are able to further support asynchronous communication by offering knowledge workers digital asset locations that are easy to remember and share. It’s tough to recall where brand logos are in your digital asset management system but it’s easy to remember go/brand.
Saving time for HR, IT, and other internal support teams
The average office worker spends 2.5 hours per day on email. Think about all of the emails, chats, and calls your HR team is inundated with each week and much of it for the same questions.
For enterprises that use go links, more time can be diverted from repetitive communication towards impactful work.
For example, HR can reduce how often they tell employees where to find the information about benefits. Instead, employees can easily visit go/benefits to find that information at any time.
Consider the enormous monetary savings from implementing go/help. IT time (which is costly) can be diverted away from telling people where to file a support ticket, and that time can instead be spent on actually handling those support tickets, or on optimizing other internal processes and systems.
Working in different time zones
Waiting to work on something is never good. For enterprises with departments and teams spread across different time zones, this can be quite frequent.
Perhaps a marketer needs an approved image template before they can post on social media. With go links, that marketer doesn’t have to wait for someone in a different time zone to help them locate the asset.
They can recall the location for themselves and keep working. No waiting required.
GoLinks versus building go links capabilities from scratch
Many large enterprises like Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yahoo, and Netflix use go links. Many ex-Googlers grow so accustomed to go links, that they champion them at their new companies.
Enterprises often use go links creatively:
- Posters in office hallways
- TVs in meeting rooms
- Townhall presentations
While go links are often typed in order to share them with one another, they can also be said audibly during meetings.
“We learned about GoLinks three months ago but didn’t start using it. For two months, every time we had a moment where we had to type a complicated link into a browser we looked at each other smirking and shouted out what the GoLink would be… “GO WEEKLY”, “GO PHLAUNCH”, “GO PR.” So eventually we had done this enough times that it was obvious to try out GoLinks. So we finally did and now we use GoLinks every day.” — Stefania Olafsdottir, co-founder of Avo
Some companies internally-built go links solutions, however, this isn’t the only way to access this technology. Using open-source go links can open your company up to security concerns.
The GoLinks platform helps enterprises offer this to employees in a way that’s more affordable, reliable, and secure. The created go links will work for employees with emails from the same domain, and can also work for subdomains too.
In addition to using the go links in their browsers, employees can also login to the platform to see what go links exist in their organization. Go links can be filtered by tags for easy discovery. This can be a quick way to locate more resources and learn about all available go links. Employees can also set up go links that will go into immediate effect company-wide.
Finding things is a big productivity problem. And for large companies, it only gets magnified.
Increase productivity and ROI for your enterprise with GoLinks.
