Four Steps (and 20+ Tips!) to Beating Paper Addiction

 

Addiction is a powerful thing. Addiction causes intelligent individuals to behave irrationally. It prompts people to exhibit behaviors that they know are detrimental to not only themselves, but those around them as well. Just ask any smoker.

 

But smokers have one thing going for them. Most people around them want them to quit.

 

The American business world, on the other hand, seems unreasonably tolerant of an addiction of its own — an addiction to paper.

 

At first glance, this addiction hardly seems as costly as the toll smoking takes on society. But when you add up the numbers, paper waste starts looking almost as ugly as an overfilled ashtray.

 

 

Paper is not a new addiction. When computers began to replace typewriters, people said it would result in businesses reducing paper use — no more would employees be trashing entire pages because of a few typos. They’d get to double- and triple-check each draft, and nothing would hit the printed page until it had been completely readied as the final hard copy.

 

That didn’t really happen. As it turned out, people within production environments at companies loved looking at hard copies of each and every draft of their reports, notes, letters, invoices, even labels. And printing and duplication had become faster and more accessible than ever. Instant gratification made the print button even more addictive.

 

Soon enough, electronic document formats took root. It became easy to share documents without requiring the physical delivery of hard copies. Teletypes gave way to fax machines, which gave way to PDFs. Today, it’s entirely possible to keep a business document electronic throughout its entire life cycle.

 

But organizations are still addicted to the print button.

 

 

Within a typical company, the cost of the addiction to the print button is relatively clearly defined — and it’s not just the paper, but also the ink on the page, which is among the most expensive commodities purchased by the typical business.

 

 

But the problem is not just what addiction is doing to your company. It’s what paper addiction doing to society as a whole.

 

The environmental effects of paper addiction are well-documented, and it’s not only about deforestation. The costs range from overfilling landfills to wasting water and energy, to adding to CO2 emissions:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Okay, enough about how bad the addiction is — you probably have gotten the point by now. Now you need to examine the behaviors that are causing this problem within your organization and within the business world on the whole.

 

Some of them come down to flaws in business processes in production environments. Often processes inherently create paper without good reason.

 

One of the most common strategic mistakes is an over-reliance on hard copy postal mail for customer communications. Increasingly, vendors and customers are willing to accept invoices and payments electronically — yet many businesses still print and mail reams of billing-related material. Paper-driven billing processes require dozens of printouts, from the invoices themselves to shipping documents, regulatory forms and payment confirmations to copies made for internal error checking and routing to relevant personnel.

 

Even for those companies no longer mailing invoices and instead using faxes, too often, much of the process remains as paper-intensive as ever. Many times incoming faxed documents are duplicated and redistributed internally as confirmations and in advance of manual key entry into financial systems.

 

In addition to process flaws, the individual worker often makes eco-unfriendly choices, such as:

 

 

 

The best advice for reducing the use of paper within an organization is to avoid printing documents unless absolutely necessary. From a strategic point of view, those managing production environments should inspire several key changes in the way they run their departments.

 

Encourage staff to use e-mail where possible to send and receive business messages. Consider alternatives to traditional fax machines, including technologies that deliver faxed documents electronically and route them automatically within organizations. Esker (News - Alert) offers a range of solutions to fit the needs of organizations of all sizes that accomplish these goals and more.

 

But even without implementing any new technology, there is often a myriad of previously untaken steps to pursue within business. Here are other tips for reducing paper use within your production environment:

 

 

 

As the New Year begins there is no better time than now to make the resolution to Quit Paper. Send along this article to your friends working within office environments so that they too can get their organizations on the road to recovery.

 

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