Discover how your internal communication practices benefit from going paperless!
Companies should consider going paperless with confidential/important documents, not only to avoid embarrassing situations but also to streamline internal communication practices.
Where does paper go when it dies? Sometimes it gets recycled and has a second life as a greeting card. Sometimes it becomes filling for the bottom of your hamster cage. And sometimes it gains national fame as float confetti in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Reusing old paper can have consequences
Hilariously reported by the NPR political quiz show Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!, one of this year’s parade-goers noticed that a strip of confetti had the words “SSN” followed by a number. It looked suspiciously like someone’s social security number. It was. Other strips had people’s phone numbers, addresses, license plate numbers, and even arrest records.
It so happens that the confetti was made out of shredded police records from the Nassau County Police Department in New York. Unfortunately, the records had been shredded horizontally, preserving the lines of information intact. Macy’s denied any involvement.
Although this story is a unique (and somewhat bizarre) example of creative reuses for paper, there are several reasons companies should consider going paperless with confidential/important documents, not only to avoid similar embarrassing situations but also to streamline internal communication practices.
Accepting the bad news about paper
The following four statistics (reported on larsonallen.com in Going Paperless Saves Time and Hassle) highlight the general workplace problems with manual paper processes:
- Workers spend 5-15% of their time reading information but up to 50% of their time trying to locate it.
- 7.5% of documents are lost; the remaining 3% are misfiled.
- Average cost to manually process a single invoice: $24
- Average labor costs spent by organizations:
- $20 to file a document
- $120 to find a misfiled document
- $200 to reproduce a lost document
We can probably all relate to the frustration of losing papers, misfiling documents, and trying to remember where in the world we put that important letter. But did we realize just how much these little, manual, paper-based frustrations were costing our companies?
Inefficient internal communication procedures that remain unchanged will end up costing companies more than a few little frustrations, including increased costs, higher turnover, and slower start times, just to name a few.
Choosing automated solutions
A report by the Aberdeen Group (“Onboarding Benchmark Report: Technology Drivers Help Improve the New Hire Experience”) claims that although a significant majority of companies (90%) believe that employees decide whether or not to stay during the first six months, many refuse to realize or admit their reliance on paper-based onboarding practices:
- affect retention rates,
- decrease time to productivity,
- increase costs,
- and often leave a bad first impression that negatively affects the company brand.
The report further states that automated and web-based solutions allow efficient management of forms, tasks, and employee socialization in the company culture, three components that are essential for every new worker. In addition to managing these three components, an automated system can also build a network, assist with compliance training, and manage performance.
Preparing for the worst
Even though the world didn’t end on December 21st, preparing for disaster is not always a crazy idea. For example, companies clinging to paper-based procedures probably store all of their important documents in filing cabinets.
I know of one company that stores their financial records in cardboard storage boxes (and they are literally running out of space). If a fire, flood, earthquake, hurricane, or a really big tornado destroyed their facilities and everything got ruined, what is their backup plan for accessing their files?
I’m not saying companies should entirely eliminate a paper trail. Paper copies of documents are still valuable.
But it’s even more valuable (and efficient) to have a back-up system of storage and organization that is not easily susceptible to natural disasters. Web-hosted services and automated programs are not only great space savers (so you don’t have to fill up your office with tons of heavy file boxes filled with paper), but they allow fast, easy, and organized electronic access to any file at any time.
Benefiting from a paperless environment
So, in review, updating our outdated, paper-based, internal communication practices with web-based and/or technological systems produces the following five benefits (among many others):
- Reduced costs
- Increased productivity
- Less employee turnover
- More efficient communication
- Disaster insurance
Stop wasting time losing, misfiling, and searching for documents. Don’t let the creative reuse of your paper-based process rain on your parade and cause you to become another embarrassing radio show anecdote. Technology transforms businesses. Let it do the same for yours!
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