When you are running a business then you are looking for every possible way to reduce cost and increase profits. There is a new trend nowadays and most businesses have started following it, going paperless, which not only reduces costs for the business and helps save some bucks but there are also various other benefits of going paperless, the most noteworthy is reducing carbon emissions. If you are considering going paperless then there is no better time to do so. Let’s have a look at some of the benefits of going paperless and why your business should join the paperless movement:
1. Reduction of Carbon Footprint
Most companies say that they want to reduce the carbon footprint in the world but still continue to use a huge volume of paper for their day-to-day tasks. Whether it is a small company or a big company, there are different departments inside every company such as the HR department, legal department, accounting department, etc and the employees of these departments print 3-4 times every day according to a study by Wakefield Research.
Every year acres of forest in the world are cut down just to manufacture paper and wood products. Wood processed products such as paper are among the top contributors to tropical deforestation in the world.
As a document is printed, it puts a further burden on the environment and contributes to deforestation. Consider departments such as HR, Accounting, Legal, etc around the world who are printing documents every day. They are increasing the carbon footprint and put a burden on the environment. When you can easily manage the documents online then why print them to put a burden on the environment.
2. Increased Productivity
Workers and Employees spend about 20-30% of their time managing and finding the right physical documents and if put in numbers then it is roughly 10-12 hours a week. When you have a whole bunch of documents in your office then it takes a lot of time, sometimes hours for you to find that single document that you were looking for.
In contrast, employees who are working in the digital environment are not known to waste time looking for documents or managing documents because everything is available virtual and they needn’t waste their searching the physical records. Such employees, who work in digital environments are known to be more efficient because they get more time to work on the things for which they were hired and less time managing and looking for physical records.
The digital environment and paperless environments help employees reach their goals and be more efficient. Employees who are known to achieve their goals tend to be more happier and productive than those who don’t. It is one of the biggest reasons why going paperless is beneficial for your business and why you should make the switch.
Digital documents are also much easier to manage as compared to conventional physical documents. Let’s take the example of PDFs which have become the industry standard document format. PDFs have graphic integrity, they are multi-dimensional, secure, compact, and there are so many different PDF tools available such as PDF Converters, PDF Mergers that make the whole process of managing documents so much easier as compared to conventional physical documents.
3. Reduction of Costs
Paper and paper-related products are costly as compared to digital documents. Not only do you have to buy the paper but also different paper-related products which include pens, staplers, files to gather those documents, etc, and also a separate room where all the official records are held. It is like money going down the drain and is not a wise thing to do for businesses, especially if they want to save some money. Going paperless can allow your company to save money.
By going paperless, you not only eliminate the cost of paper and paper-related products but your employees also get to focus on their work and why they were hired instead of wasting time managing and searching for physical documents. Plus, there are so many digital tools available that will improve productivity in a very small period of time.
Having paper in this digital age is just not the right business decision. In addition to the waste of time and effort that employees put into searching and managing physical documents, there is also a waste of money and money is just going down the drain.
4. Digital Transformation
Digital Transformation is happening all over the world and over the past decade, it has taken over the world like a swarm. For businesses, it is very beneficial because it easily integrates all the areas of business into a single digital platform and completely changes the way how companies operate. Regardless of the size or industry of the business, digital transformation has become very essential in this age.
Companies who have been operating through traditional methods may have a hard time making this shift towards the digital world and the workers may also be fearful about this change but technology is just helping us to become more efficient, more productive, and this ultimately leads to more revenue.
Going paperless is just another way for businesses to embrace digital transformation and there are so many different tools and technologies available that make this whole process so much easier.
5. Information Security and Disaster Recovery
When people talk about digital transformation then they focus on digital security and cyber threats but they overlook the insecurity of physical documents. A single piece of paper can contain sensitive information about employees and it isn’t that difficult to steal a single piece of record.
Along with this, talk about disaster recovery. If there was to occur any unforeseen event or a disaster in which the physical records of a company were lost or burnt then it would be nearly impossible to get those records back or recover them, whereas, if there was unforeseen circumstance and all the digital records were lost then can still be recovered due to the digital backup that contains all the previous records.
Now, what would you prefer, losing all the physical records and not being able to recover them or losing the digital records and recovering them as nothing happened, obviously the latter one!
