21-Century Office. Convenient, Beneficial, Paperless!
The modern trend for paperless offices has caused quite a stir among companies. Some of them prefer switching to the digital format, others state it’s insecure and there are serious threats for confidential data. Still, the trend is obvious. The percentage of large enterprises, small and medium businesses that go paperless grows every month. What’s more, the global COVID-19 pandemic urged businesses to make their workflows fully digital.
So, let’s see what benefits and shortcomings this approach has, and learn how to switch to a fully digital paperless office!
Why Should You Use Paperless Office Software?
If you are still hesitating whether to switch your workflow into the digital format, you should consider the following benefits:
1. Saving Time
Time spent on printing, managing, and finding paper documents can be spent more productively when having all files in one repository. Of course, finding digital documents among hundreds of texts and spreadsheets may be challenging for those who’re doing this for the first time. However, a well-organised digital document management system is the solution. Finally, there is a search bar in most of them, so the system does everything for you. No paper storages system can do that!
2. Saving Space
Tons of paper clutter tables, shelves, and cabinets. Digitising files allows you to have only a laptop or computer on the table. Even notebooks are becoming outdated, as modern office suite apps offer all these options in one solution! Except for bundles of printed documents, office apps replace bulky equipment — printers, scanners, and so on.
3. Saving Money
Printing documents is very expensive. Only US companies spend more than $120 billion annually. Just imagine the cost of printing docs in the whole world! Compared to traditional workflows, digital workspaces only need a subscription per each user. If you are still not sure whether the transition to the digital format is efficient, calculate your costs on papers, ink, printers, and maintaining equipment, and compare it to the cost of the subscription. The latter always wins!
4. Increasing Productivity
Online collaboration tools allow teams to become more productive since everyone can have instant access to the necessary information. We are talking not only about office suite apps that commonly work with all popular formats but about integrations with CRMs, messengers, and various professional apps. You can share a file in a second, invite your colleagues to edit it, convert it to another format, etc. The whole process doesn’t take long. And now imagine how much time would you need to share a printed document. You’d have to find it in a cabinet among a handful of other documents, go to your colleague and spend time discussing it with them. In the digital world, you cope with everything at least twice faster.
5. Helping Environment to Recover
The greenhouse effect is not an ephemeral phenomenon only Greta Thunberg is worried about. We all see the climate changes that in most cases cause negative effects — destructive cyclones, air pollution, a shift of the seasons. Paper manufacturing, as well as toners, ink, and non-renewable elements finding refuge in a landfill, severely damage our planet. So, digitising your workflow will help us save the Earth for our children.
Statistics Proving the Efficiency of Fully Digital Offices:
RecordNations shares shocking statistics on paper usage, which might horrify even those who have never thought about environmental issues.
- An average employee spends 30–40% of their time looking for the necessary data recorded on paper.
- 70% of companies would close in a 3-week period if they lost their paper-based records due to a force majeure like a flood.
- 45% of paper documents go to a trash bin by the end of the day. By the way, the Environmental Protection Agency confirms that landfills are filled with paper trash even more than by plastic and metal litter.
- All in all, US companies spend more than $120 billion a year on printing documents. Unfortunately, most of them get outdated in 2–3 months.
According to the Xerox survey, at least 80% of small and medium businesses are eager to use paperless office software to reduce costs, cut out inefficiencies, and minimize waste.
Why Should You Forget About Common Digitalisation Fears?
Here are the top reasons why some companies are still using paper documents.
- Wary of innovation. New things are always alarming. Those who have been sticking to the traditional way of doing business can’t quickly put up with the idea that they have to reorganise the whole way of doing things.
Once you realise the benefits digitising implies, all worries will vanish. - Security issues. Many companies postpone switching to online offices due to security reasons. However, not all cloud solutions for offices mean information leaks. On the contrary, most of them are secure enough to even withstand hacker attacks.
- Adhering to old habits. The comfort zone glues people and companies. Using a familiar path is always easier than inventing the wheel once again. Still, old habits can be transformed into new ones in just 21 days. Using online office solutions may be hard for the first time. Once you learn its functions and use each of them for at least once, working with apps becomes easy and efficient.
- Time-consuming transition to the digital workflow. This point comes out of the previous. Establishing a new way of working happens just once. After you’re done with transferring files into the cloud, they stay there forever. Sure, the company will dedicate days or even weeks to the migration. Still, these time costs will be compensated in the future.
- The illusion of lost control. Old-fashioned managers prefer working with papers, as this shows involvement in the process and also to some extent allows them to control employees. In fact, immersion in a mountain of papers means less control compared to the digital workflow. Having collaboration tools at hand, a manager can also open the necessary file and check the progress.
Digital Transformation. The Path to Your Paperless Office Solution
So, you’ve decided to establish a fully paperless workflow at your company.
Here are 5 key steps to take:
- Digitise all documents. Convert them to digital by scanning and taking photos. Also, you can leave important docs on paper. Working in the online format doesn’t imply not having papers at all. Just save old ones and don’t generate new paper docs.
- Organise them. There shouldn’t be a mess in your central repository. For example, put legal documents separately from marketing files. Some folders might have different access levels, so keep control over that.
- Automate your workflow. Create instructions and how-to’s to let employees do everything they need at work. Introduce support or contact forms to automate their connection with the tech department if something goes wrong.
- Test your paperless office software for a couple of months. Collect feedback from colleagues, check bugs and issues. Write everything down to fix it later. Get used to the new digital workflow and help others to succeed.
- Improve your online office. Implement improvements unless your paperless office software is understandable and convenient for everyone.
What Results Should You Wait For?
In just 2–3 months, you will feel the increase of the teams’ productivity thanks to using online office suite apps. The key to this is less time spent on contacting each other and collaborating on documents without leaving the workplace.
In general, teams and colleagues should achieve these goals:
- Replace correspondence, paper mail, and faxes with convenient email.
Use cloud-sharing office suite apps instead of writing long abstracts when working. - Take notes in mobile apps at meetings, forget about paper notebooks. The only exception is a whiteboard (btw, you can take photos of it to keep the information presented).
- Use apps for creating to-do lists, roadmaps, and other small yet important stuff instead of sticky notes, notebooks, and papers.
- Use e-signatures to sign agreements to save time on signing documents and sending them by traditional mail, and then waiting for your copy to come back for ages.
Keep in mind that switching to a fully paperless office solution is always a team effort. Motivate your colleagues to use apps for working online. Show them their convenience and efficiency. Help them to learn the functionality of apps. Don’t stand aside, because the transition to a new level should always affect the entire ecosystem of the company. Each team member should contribute to this. And know, together you are strong and can achieve much!
