feedFive barriers to the paperless office
This blog post got me thinking about something that’s been around, according to wikipedia at least, since 1975: the paperless office.
Generation Y has, by and large, earned their digital stripes. We’re technology savvy and, coincidentally, we’re also environmentally conscious. Add those two together and you get a generation of employees that might finally push to make the paperless office a reality.
That said, my two years of experience in the workplace have shown me that there are still a number of barriers to the paperless office that have absolutely nothing to do with the readiness of the technology. Unfortunately — or, I guess, fortunately, if you’re one of those people who loves their printer — paper is pretty culturally and politically ingrained into office life.
Here’s a list of a just a few of barriers I’ve noticed standing in the way of a paperless utopia.
1. Signatures
The Problem: Let’s start with the obvious one: people need to sign things. And there is no real way — accessible to your average office — to sign a document without printing it out first.
On one hand, I absolutely understand why this is a barrier. The signature is really all we have, in this digital age, to act as a marker indicating that, yes, this came from me. And a scanned-in signature obviously isn’t worth as much, given how easy it would be to cut and paste a signature from one file to another.
On the other hand, though, my to-hell-with-history side is asking why we still put such an emphasis on signatures as any kind of legal indicator of anything. Especially given that a lot of signatures are now faxed through on contracts or whatever. Do you know how easy it would be to fake a faked signature? The only prerequisite is knowing basic arts and crafts. You need scissors and a glue stick. And even with in-person signatures, it’s not as if they’re above reproach in terms of forgery or whatever. Going digital and doing away with old-fashioned signatures might actually INCREASE security, assuming we use encryption or PGP or similar.
How we get around it: Barring doing away with the signature altogether (admittedly unlikely), I’m thinking touch screen technology might actually help with this one. Being able to ‘sign’ your screen with a stylus, like you do to accept a Fed Ex package or (at some retailers) sign your credit card receipt, is likely just as good as signing a piece of paper.
2. On-screen proof reading and editing modes
The Problem: One of the big reasons people still print out documents is so that they can take a red pen to them. And why not? This is how we’re taught to edit other people’s work. Even if you’ve never taken a copy editing course in your life, you’ve likely been passively trained to edit on paper. It’s how all your teachers did it, after all.
How to get around it: Let’s start in the schools by training, and then encouraging (and, if necessary, forcing), teachers to edit student assignments on screen. The technology is already there: Microsoft Word’s ‘Track Changes’ mode is probably one of the most powerful features of the program. And, if that’s too complicated, just highlighting in red is a perfectly fine substitute.
3. Digital back-ups
The Problem:Despite using it every day, the older generation still doesn’t have much in the way of trust for technology. You can see it in every middle-aged person making off-hand comments about how things used to be when the e-mail server goes down for two minutes in the morning.
And they’re not without justification. A lot of companies did not have a smooth transition when it came time to adopt computers and the internet into day-to-day procedures. Most egregiously, many of them had lacklustre or sometimes non-existent back-up solutions, leading — on occasion — to massive data loss, either due to virus or hardware failure. Or, as I’ve had it described to me once or twice, because of gremlins.
Because of this, a lot of people see a hard copy of something as more tangible: once they’ve printed it out, they can’t lose it. It won’t just disappear.
How to get around it: Back-ups Back-ups Back-ups. Apple’s Time Machine is a step in the right direction, as an effortless, user-friendly way of backing up files. And, while network-level back-up systems are obviously a necessity, there’s something to be said to doing user-level back-ups as well — letting people see how their own files are backed up, and where they’ll be if something were to happen to their computer. Once they have that level of calm, hopefully they’ll be less likely to print everything for posterity’s sake.
4. Battery Life
The Problem: Having everyone use laptops or other portable devices as a meeting might sound like a good idea, but it can quickly fall apart when everyone is looking for an outlet 20 minutes in. Ideally, it’d be great to just have everyone reference the agenda file in a network folder, avoiding having to put ‘packages’ together that often total dozens of pages, but that plan is only workable if everyone has a screen that works.
How to get around it: I think the holy grail of battery life for laptops is somewhere in the neighbourhood of ten to 12 hours. Once people can pull their computer out at work in the morning and not worry about charging it all day, the on-the-go dream will truly start to take hold. Given that battery technology is not advancing as fast it should this isn’t likely to happen anytime soon. Unfortunately, the meeting room might be the last place to go paperless.
5. “I can’t read on a screen”
The problem: Most people nowadays are comfortable using a computer for active tasks like typing an e-mail or an essay, but when it comes to a passive task like reading, they maintain that they need paper.
For anyone touting paperless as the way to go, “I can’t read on a screen” is going to be a familiar rebuttal. There are, for better or worse, a group of people who just find the idea of reading a long document on a computer screen to be incredibly unpleasant. And so they go to their printer.
How to get around it: Some of this is purely just people being stubborn: it’s not how they’re used to reading things, so they don’t like it. But I think, if you dig deep, a lot of the reluctance people have about reading on-screen comes from the screen they’ll be doing their reading on. How many of these people are using low-bit LCDs at some weird resolution? Worse, how many of them are using ancient CRTs with terrible refresh rates?
Of course reading on screen will suck if you don’t have a screen suited to your eyes. For employers seeking a paperless workplace, giving employees high-quality monitors that are easy on the eyes is undoubtedly the first step. Cheaping out on computer screens is a surefire way to ensure that your employees — particularly your older employees, as their eyesight starts to go — will be running to the printer every opportunity they get.
And so
There are undoubtedly more. Coming into the workplace, I was all abuzz about how I was going to make the workplace paperless. Having experienced it now for a few years, I can see how hard it truly will be to separate paper out of the workplace equation. Even if you don’t print anything, someone is bound to print things for you.
Any tips for reaching paperless status? Let me know.
Hi Matt – I’m glad that a blog post of mine actually made someone think! ;^)
You have presented some great ideas and thoughts here. I think that things will continue to evolve the daily office life, and with advances in mind/machine interfaces who really can predict what the next form will take.
Matt – on signatures: “The Problem: Let’s start with the obvious one: people need to sign things. And there is no real way — accessible to your average office — to sign a document without printing it out first.”
This is exactly why we founded EchoSign to solve this (www.echosign.com) and now have over 250,000 using us to do just that — get a signature electronically in seconds, without having to learn or download anything, for the “average office”
[...] already written a bit about electronic books and the notion of a paperless world, but Todd Shultz got me thinking about the topic again in a different light. If you haven’t [...]
Matt,
You have valid five points.
But my personal view is that other than signature and backup problems, other reasons are attitude driven.
However as you mentioned networked environment could be a solution, even terminal work stations with centralized storage is more attractive. since there is no difference which terminal you use, your individual settings will be the same.
Thus real problem is signatures, proof of presence……etc.
Even in e-government environment due to this, it will maintain hard copies.
Reading on a screen is unpleasant for many people. Especially in law or other areas were the papers need to be scrutinized carefully. Personally I have had to buy 3 new pairs of glasses in 6 months due to moving to a ‘paperless office’. Organizations that force people not to print are typically trying to cut costs and certainly won’t be buying people new, expensive monitors, or even giving them enough room in their cubicles to position ergonomically and comfortably.