With the paperless office held up as the holy grail of workplace etiquette, Andy Johnson highlights the difference between a must print and a must not
Despite claims for years that we are moving towards a paperless office, documents and the need for them continues to be a key part of office culture. Figures show there has been a stable growth in the global paper market in the past five years, and this is expected to continue over the next five. As more people work remotely, and working traditions evolve, now is the perfect time to become a savvy printer. Learn your printing musts from your must nots: when should you be printing, and when is it better to work digitally? This will make your work more cost-effective, productive and efficient.
Whether it?s for providing wage slips, signing contracts or producing hard copies of reports, printing documents is essential for business. Assess processes end-to-end and determine how significant a printed document is. For example, if your task is to agree the terms and conditions of a contract with a client, a printed copy of that document is the most concrete way to confirm an understanding between the two parties. Practical printing is a must. Hard copies also have a stronger impact. Getting an attachment of a report in an email is somehow not quite as impressive as receiving that same copy in paper format. Printing helps to emphasise volume and allows people to access documents more readily ? there?s something inexplicably more exciting about giving and receiving work by hand. Impactful printing is a must.
However, mountains and mountains of paperwork in the office is nobody?s idea of heaven. That?s where the printing must-nots come into play.
Developments in technology have led to an increase in the amount of data and information that we can use and access digitally. Indeed, if we wanted to, we could do just about everything via technology: access, edit, read, copy. Documenting everything in paper format is no longer necessary, or indeed beneficial.
Using this technology in the right way can help to make your job as a PA much easier.
Print as you need, not needlessly. If you have large filing systems, managing these digitally will save you significant amounts of time and space. Large paper archives can take up unnecessary amounts of storage and can be time-consuming to administer. Storing these digitally will also help you to avoid losing documents, providing all files are safely backed-up. Printing a mass of documents to hoard in a corner of the office is a printing must-not.
So what about the paper receipts and documents that already exist?
Transforming these files into a digital format will also make these easier to manage, and accessible for all in the office. This may seem like a daunting and laborious task, but a high-speed scanner will make the job much quicker and easier. If your business is using the Cloud storage system, providing particularly busy employees with mobile scanners to use out of the office will make admin jobs such as expenses an easier task for all. Encourage them to scan paper receipts on-the-go, creating digital web versions, which are much easier to keep track of. Putting off going digital is a must-not. We may not be moving towards a paperless office just yet, but a print-sensible one should definitely be on the cards.
Andy Johnson is Product & Solutions Manager at Brother UK, which provides printers and other devices for offices. To find out more, visit brother.co.uk
