The Paperless Office

Well, one of my readers provided this article's topic. He had asked about tips for making an office paperless. Although, I believe that we will probably never truly have a paperless office, I do believe that less paper is very probable. We must not only reduce our use of paper for less clutter in our offices, but environmentally it is the right thing to do.

So how do we go about moving toward using less paper? Here are a few ideas from me:

*Most word processing programs today allow for tracking of changes to a document. This is a great way to route a document in your office for review. In MS Word, each person making changes is assigned a different color and who made the changes is tracked. No more olden days of printing the document, putting a paper route slip on it and sending it through everyone, then making all the changes, printing it out again, attaching a route slip again - well you get the picture.

*Hate to harp on the pdf files (honestly not getting any kickbacks from Adobe), but if you have policy and procedure manuals, employee handbooks, etc. make them pdf and available via e-mail, your intranet, or your web site. If you want to make sure that every employee is given one, then designate your HR people to send them via email. I know as an employee that I very rarely (if ever) looked at my employee handbook. Also if there was a handbook or procedure manual that I needed, I only really needed a couple pages out of it - not a copy of the whole manual.

*Businesses should also look at the forms they use. Do you really need a hard copy or could it be done electronically and sent to the proper person?

*Lastly, floppies are cheap and you can store several documents on one. Instead of printing everything out for your files, store them on disk. Each year I do a clean up on my computer and move stuff to disks that I keep in a notebook with pages that hold disks by my desk. This way I don't need to dig through a file cabinet drawer looking for a piece of paper. All my disks are clearly marked with what files are on them.

Save a tree - send it electronically!