There are a lot of ways to make your office’s environmental footprint a lot smaller so you can try to do your bit against climate change. One of the best things you can do is to reduce your consumption of material. In other words, to use less resources. Make your office paperless is a fantastic way to go about this as businesses are responsible for most of the paper used across the world.
And it’s been rendered unnecessary these days with the cloud, blockchain, and internet of things. There are many ways to reduce your paper consumption that don’t require too many growing pains. With the tips to follow, you can achieve a paperless office before you know it!
Digitize everything
The first step is going to be the most difficult and time-consuming but once it’s done then everything else is much easier.
You’ll need to have a lot of scanners to make digital copies of all your documents which means having a team that is dedicated to doing this. Most documents will require a full scan, while others can use a scanner app and a smartphone to make the digital copies.
The transition will take a while and will cost you in terms of money and manpower, but once the system is complete it will pay for itself as paperless offices save a lot of money.
Focus on security
One of the biggest benefits of going paperless is the fact that you have a much more secure way to store and handle documents. Paper can degrade and become illegible over time.
Not only that, but people can easily make copies of sensitive documents and pass them around without anybody being the wiser. When you have your documents digitized, then every time it is accessed it leaves a signal. You can set up security measures that not only keep them safe from hackers but also have locks to prevent them from being accessed by anybody.
Get digital signatures
There is no need at all for paper documents to be signed any longer. With the Internet of Things and machine learning, you can have a digital signature that is much stronger than a physical one.
A digital signature can’t be hidden or copied and is one of a kind as it leaves unique metadata that is difficult to manipulate. Using the blockchain for this is even more secure as smart contracts cannot be hacked or changed by anybody.
Get your storage worked out
You’ll save so much space from not needing a physical place to store your papers that you may even be able to downsize your office. But, you do need to make sure that you have a good system for your storage of digital documents.
How the documents are stored is going to depend on the type of document and who will need to access it. Some can simply be stored on a secure cloud account while others may need to be stored on a physical drive that certain employees only have access to.
