“Who approves purchase orders?”, “Who is covering for the deputy head this week?”, “Where do I send this medical certificate?” In schools and companies alike, these questions come up every day and cost everyone time. A reliable staff directory, backed by an up-to-date organisation chart, answers them in seconds, provided it is well maintained and respects everyone’s personal data.
The hidden cost of “who handles what?”
Looking for the right information, or the right person, is one of the biggest time drains at work. In its State of Teams 2025 report, based on a survey of 12,000 knowledge workers and 200 executives, Atlassian estimates that teams spend about a quarter of their time searching for answers. Half of respondents also said teams had unknowingly worked on the same thing.
These figures concern large companies, mostly outside Africa. But the mechanism is the same in a school with 40 teachers or a small business in Cotonou: when nobody knows who does what, people interrupt colleagues, wait for replies, send requests to the wrong department or redo work that has already been done.
Three signs your directory is failing
- Phone numbers travel from phone to phone and nobody is sure they still work.
- The organisation chart pinned up in the front office is several years old.
- Newcomers keep asking the same questions to the same person.
A directory that helps newcomers settle in
The stakes are especially high in education. According to UNESCO’s Global Report on Teachers, published in 2024, the attrition rate among primary teachers almost doubled worldwide, from 4.62% in 2015 to 9.06% in 2022, with teachers often leaving within their first five years. Sub-Saharan Africa will also need 15 million new teachers by 2030.
In other words, every school year brings new faces: teachers, part-time staff, supervisors, administrative staff. For them, the directory and the organisation chart are often their first map of the institution. A new teacher who knows from day one who their academic lead is, who manages the rooms and who to contact about pay settles in faster and relies less on colleagues.
What a good profile includes
- Name, role and department.
- Line manager, so the organisation chart builds itself.
- Work contact details and preferred contact method.
- Areas the person handles (admissions, exams, purchasing…).
- Backup contact when they are away.
Directories and personal data: what Benin’s law implies
A staff directory is a personal data file. In Benin, its protection falls under Book V of the Digital Code (Law No. 2017-20) and Law No. 2009-09, supervised by the data protection authority, the APDP. According to Data Protection Africa’s summary, personal data must be processed fairly, lawfully and transparently, be adequate and accurate, and be kept only as long as necessary. Data controllers must notify the APDP of their processing and report data breaches to it.
Individuals have rights of access, rectification, objection and erasure, as the government portal’s privacy policy also points out. For a directory, this translates into a few good practices:
- Limit the fields to what work requires: no home address or date of birth if they serve no purpose.
- Prefer work contact details; only show a personal number with the person’s consent.
- Restrict access to logged-in staff, rather than a public list or a shared spreadsheet.
- Let everyone report an error, and fix it quickly.
- Remove people who leave as soon as they go.
Checklist: keeping the directory up to date
- Appoint a directory owner (often HR or the front office).
- Link every profile to a department and a manager: the organisation chart follows.
- Add directory updates to your joining and leaving procedures.
- Run a full review at the start of each school year or semester.
- Announce newcomers to the whole team, with their role.
- Check once a year that the fields you collect are still necessary.
How SciAut Intranet helps
SciAut Intranet, the internal communication tool of the SciAut Suite, puts the directory at the heart of the organisation:
- Directory: staff listed by department and role, with an organisation chart.
- Discussion channels and private messages: once you have found the right person, contact them directly, attachments included.
- Announcement feed with read receipts: introduce newcomers and make sure the information is seen.
- Shared documents: welcome booklet and procedures filed by department, with versions and access rights.
- Shared calendar: welcome meetings and internal events, with reminders.
- Notifications on the web, on the phone or by email, according to each person’s preferences.
If your internal communication still runs mainly through messaging groups, read our article on moving beyond WhatsApp groups.
Conclusion
A staff directory is nothing spectacular, but it saves time every day, reassures newcomers and shows that your organisation takes its staff’s data seriously. Discover SciAut Intranet or request a demo.
Sources
- State of Teams 2025 — Atlassian, 2025
- Atlassian: AI could help workers stop wasting 2.4 billion hours searching for information — UNLEASH, 2025
- Global report on teachers: what you need to know — UNESCO, 2024
- Benin — Data Protection Africa — ALT Advisory, 2022
- Privacy policy of the gouv.bj portal (in French) — Government of Benin, accessed 2026
