The survey, which took in responses from more than 2,000 adults last month, found that the problem is widespread and ends up costing mid-sized firms as much as £700,000 every year.
According to Iron Mountain, the sponsor of the survey, with more than 60% of all company information now carried on PCs and laptops, looking for lost or deleted files is clearly a waste of valuable staff time and a burden on IT helpdesk resources that can sap employee morale.
For a company with 250 employees, says Iron Mountain, this means that up to 2,300 working hours a week – just under two hours a day per employee – are potentially wasted, costing the business up to £700,000 a year.
Richard Ellis, the firm's sales director, said that looking for documents can be extremely frustrating for employees, as well as damaging for the business.
"With more and more employees working remotely on laptops and struggling to deal with an ever-growing quantity of information, it is inevitable that documents will get lost – the consequence of a hard drive failure, the theft of a portable device or accidental deletion – resulting in anguished calls to the IT department", he said.
Ellis went on to say that the research also showed that well-intentioned company policies on how to store and manage company information are not always getting through to the workforce.
"The survey revealed that around a quarter (23%) of office workers are unaware or not very aware of their organisation's data management policies, leaving the company vulnerable to damaging data breaches and security infringements", he said.
"Having a professional and efficient data backup solution in place for business computers means that firms can implement these policies without having to rely on individual employees", he added.
Ellis concluded by noting that there are IT solutions that exist today to safely protect and back up company information making it accessible through a secure web portal.
These solutions, he says, have the additional benefit of taking the pressure off employees in terms of understanding and implementing the organisation's data management policies.
"This offers automatic data protection enabling employees to quickly and securely move data to and from their laptops", he said.