Staples’ loss is your gain. If you’re still using paper, then fundamentally, you’re losing paper, the good kind, you know, money. According to a YouGov survey, SME’s in the UK alone waste more than £4.2 million per-day in revenues looking for documents.
A paperless office isn’t just Greenpeace propaganda, it’s a step towards an ergonomic working environment which will flourish both logistically and financially. However, if you’re not yet convinced, here’s our top 4 reasons to ditch the paper:
1. Time
Benjamin Franklin said ‘time is money’, at least I think he did, but I don’t have time to check. Because yes you guessed it, the implementation of your time, or how you use your time is how you make your money. Time looking through filing-cabinets for a document you signed three years ago is time wasted.
Time ordering papers in a filing- cabinet so you don’t repeat the former, is time wasted. Time doing anything other than producing business-strategies and creating output, is, you guessed it, time wasted.
You wouldn’t waste your money in these ways, so why waste your time seeing no real returns? Using an electronic drive or database eradicates this cumbersome task in an instant, a keyword search is all it takes to locate a document and you also avoid the risk of a paper cut.
2. Storage
Okay, most obviously we’re telling you that storing paper is not only a waste of time, but also a waste of space. Do you need to spend unnecessary money on filing cabinets? Do you have the office space to waste on these filing-cabinets? That’s not even the end of it, using masses of paper, means using masses of paper-related tools, which aren’t cheap or easily stored either.
Boxes of pens, staplers, paper clips, ring binders, hole punches, sign-off stamps. Becoming paperless not only means cost saving but also saving in a whole range of other areas, including space. You can even swap a storeroom full of unused Bics for a meeting/liaising room for your team.
3. Accessability
More and more we’re seeing rise of collaborative digital creation with the likes of Google Documents, which allows a number of multiple users simultaneously edit, update, suggest and comment on documents in live real time.
Collaborative documentation is not only time saving, but also a great way for real-time, cross-communication inside and outside of the office, without the need for loud telephone calls or unnecessary emails.
This has seen the likes of IDBS create the electronic lab notebook which keep users informed by pushing content in real time to configurable dashboards. We’ve come a long way from faxing over documents, and paper is now both archaic and obsolete in the collaborative digital world.
4. Corporate social responsibility
Whether you like it or not, you do have a responsibility to uphold ethical social practices, and both your employees and your clients will be affected by this in some way. A paperless office not only benefits your internal efficiency and business output, but is a small positive step externally in regards to future sustainability. The adverse environmental effects of paper pollution and deforestation are not something you should want to, or have to, be part of.
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5. Act for the planet
If everyone would stop using paper maybe we could save more trees.
Oh and by the way, Evernote is an awesome tool to go paperless :)
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