How Do You Encourage Employees to Go Paperless?

The new age has long since come and we are still getting up to date with all the new changes. One of those new changes was the complete modernising of business offices – an endeavour pursued even today. From shared offices and desks, to cubicles and new office hardware, to individual offices and a variety of means to make the office a pleasant place to work at, the updates have been reaching the workplaces again and again. And what is the new ‘fad’? Why, it’s paperless offices.

Think about it. All the paper in any building is a fire hazard, it collects an absurd amount of dust, and if you have ever gone through an archive to look up something from five years ago, you know just how toilsome this process could be. The further you go back, the bigger the amount of dust you breathe as you struggle through crumbling sheets of paper which only need one spark to create a fiery torrent and make the whole building go up in flames. And not to mention all the paper cuts!
Many offices today deal with this with office clearance, removing all papers, and digitalising all their work and replacing all the nasty paper with a reliable computer screen and a hard drive that contains more information than any archive room – or even library – can store in one place. It really does sound like the idea of the century, but how do you go on about these changes without perplexing your employees?

1. Digitalise all the data.
That archive will not go away forever once the office clearance services are done. Before they even get here, you can hire people to scan everything from the archives and none of the information will be lost. You might think this too laborious, but even libraries have been doing it, so it is nothing new, and you can hire reliable people outside the company and thus create a few job openings here and there.

2. Discourage the use of paper.
Tell your employees to use as little paper as possible. Forbid the use of paper for business deals and accept only visual presentations during meetings. Have everybody carry around a flash drive in case they need information stored. If anybody uses paper even for notes, they can supply themselves with it and the office should not provide paper for anything except contracts and documents that you cannot otherwise use.

3. Request paperless bills and statements.
Tell your local service providers that you wish to receive only electronic copies of contracts and statements – signed and scanned, and made into a .pdf file replica which will go into a few copies to your company servers. The more providers and banks that give you such a service, the more paperless the office becomes, and with your official documents stored digitally, then paper as a whole becomes an object of future waste removals.

4. Encourage app use.
Electronic stores like Google Play provide so many useful office apps nowadays that you barely need a pen and paper to get a job done. Find the proper app for your job, or get a software company to develop one, and thrive with the miracles of programming.

5. Give lessons about Google Docs, Evernote, and so on.
With so many programmes nowadays, you barely need any papers. Instead of spending money on buying paper for copies during presentations, teach your employees to use Google Docs or another such service. Then all you will need will be a room full of laptops and you can share and make corrections to any file you wish with however many people you wish.

6. Punish paper use.
This may sound aggressive and intimidating, but we are not talking about fines, beatings, and firings. Simply do not let anybody enter a meeting room if they’re holding a folder. Stop the distribution of paper and stop people with paper presentations from doing them by telling them that they will be allowed to once they have prepared a Power Point one instead. Once a worker’s productivity starts falling due to paper use, their physical documents will soon become an object of junk disposal and they will soon join the digital bandwagon.

With these steps you can transform your office into a paperless machine that will reduce waste, and reduce money spent on rubbish removal and office clearance services. Think smart and modernise the workplace as much as you can to keep your company ahead of the game.