Is it time to take your office paperless?
You know this feeling? An in-tray full to bursting; drawers crammed with pieces of paper you have yet to file into a cupboard and never look at again; hunting for handwritten employee data lost in a mountain of potential papercuts.
It doesn’t have to be this way, especially in 2013, and really, given the torment we’re already putting the planet through, it really shouldn’t be. If you think your office is weighed down under too much paper, as an HR Professional, why not lead the charge to take your office paperless
We’ve all heard the statistic – “it takes 17 trees to produce one ton of paper.”
This is relevant to newsprint, not printer paper, and it could be as high as 24, depending on what kind of paper you use. Here’s an alarming number – 6% of a tree to make one ream of office paper. Doesn’t sound like much? That’s almost 17 reams per tree. Not even 4 standard 5 ream boxes. Look at a tree. Now picture 17 reams of paper. Now look at the tree. Think about how much paper your office has gone through in the last couple of months. Look at the floor. Check out conservatree for some more statistics and some good advice on reducing and recycling paper. Even if you’re using recycled office paper, there’s no reason that cutting down on overall use shouldn’t be examined.
More and more businesses are turning to online document storage, thanks to services like Dropbox, Google Docs/Drive, and The Cloud. Everyone has an email address these days- why not pdf. your payslips? Not only will it guarantee secure delivery, it means staff will have an archive and you won’t end up needing to reprint 3 months’ worth every time an employee needs to rent a flat. With myriad online and email based alternatives, there is no reason I can think of that anyone in 2013 would still be using a fax machine, unless you’re addicted to the spam it spits out on a regular basis. Most of these programs are either free or cheap, and can only save you time and money in the long run.
If you’re really limited by budget or systems, there are always places improvements can be made – maybe you can’t go 100% paperless, but I’ve seen far too many times a colleague print out an email to turn it into a to do list, or to make notes, edit, and then make changes on the screen only to print out another copy minutes later. Even if you recycle your waste paper, the recycling process uses energy that wouldn’t need to be spent if you switched to an electronic task list like todolist. You can use open workbench if your needs are more demanding, and the built in to do list in MS Outlook does the job well enough. Encourage those around you to use less paper- it’s often my older and less tech savvy workmates who will go the paper route, but I say don’t give up – show them that the time they spend learning a new technology will pay for itself tenfold when they’re saved trips to the printer and the inevitable loss of a vital document, leading to an hour of searching only to find you left it at home. Showing some employees how to tick the “print double sided” box in their print menu might be all you can get out of them- it all adds up however, and could lead to a significant reduction in their paper usage, especially if they’re printing long documents like contracts or induction packs.
If you do think you might turn paperless, here’s a great guide on how to by Typeaway: I highly recommend giving it a read. Not only will it help you avoid some common mistakes early on, it also illustrates just how daunting the whole project isn’t.
As an HR Professional, you’re in a unique place to start a paperless revolution. Sell it to the finance department – it’s significantly cheaper (paper, storage, human resource cost). You might have to spend a bit of money initially, however there’s nothing to do but save it in the long run. Sell it to your colleagues (less time filing, less waste, better archiving, indexing, and searchability). Sell it to the IT department – new toys to play with. Sell it to your CEO or HR Director (all of the above, plus it’s great for the environment). You might have to drag your company kicking and screaming into the 21st Century but I guarantee they will thank you for it, when instead of searching through piles of files arranged with no particular order, they can type a couple of keywords into a well indexed repository of documentation from the office or home or on a mobile device and find exactly what they were looking for.
And if not, well. At least you tried. The trees will thank you if no