The average office worker in the US will use over 10,000 sheets of paper in an average year. With over 90 millions tons of waste being produced in this area, this is something which needs to change very quickly if the impact isn’t felt by generations to come. Of course, though, going from using so much of the stuff to nothing at all may sound like an impossible task. To help you out with this, this post highlights some of the best ways to rid your company of paper, enabling you to save money while improving the planet, all without having to change the way your employees work.
Collaboration Tools
Over the last few years, collaboration has become a very important feature of a lot of different kinds of software. Office 365, for example, enables users to create all sorts of documents together, sharing some of the most common file formats to make it much easier to collaborate. With the sharing features available, it is possible to entirely avoid printing things out, instead using online versions of each document to make sure that everyone is able to see what they need to.
Document Management
Of course, though, even if you handle all of your internal documents like this, there will always be those which come from external businesses to worry about. Most will be happy to provide you with digital versions of the letters and other files they need to send to you, with a document management company doing the rest. This sort of service can collect and curate all of your paperwork for you, storing it securely on a remote server to be accessed from anywhere around the world.
Email Communications
Not many people are using communication methods like letters, anymore. Instead, to make sure that they can get their messages to the right places, most businesses prefer to use email, nowadays. This is another area where tools like Office 365 can be helpful, providing you with a professional email address which will look great to your customers and clients. Along with this, services like Constant Contact make it possible to send out bulk messages to large groups of people.
Internal Policies
Finally, as the last consideration, it’s time to think about the internal policies your business uses. In a lot of cases, employees won’t realize how much of an impact saving paper can have, and will use it wastefully on a daily basis. To overcome this issue, setting strict rules which only allow them to use paper when it is absolutely necessary is a good idea, enabling you to start the process of making your company completely paperless.
Unless you’re using recycled paper, there are very few ways to use a resource like this without it being damaging to the environment. Of course, though, along with this, paper is insecure, expensive, and can easily get lost, making digital methods of storing data much better for companies operating in the modern age.
