6 Benefits of a Paperless Office

What Is a Paperless Office?

A paperless office eliminates or significantly reduces the use of physical documents like receipts, bills, and memos. It lacks typical office devices and supplies like scanners, printers, and shredders. Things like binders, hole punches, or paperclips are also rather scarce in paperless offices. Essentially, almost everything that would traditionally be printed is stored, edited, and shared digitally.

Now you know what a paperless office is, it’s time to dig into the benefits of a paperless office. But before you do, if you haven’t already, be sure to check out our step-by-step guide on how to go paperless in the office.

One Advantage of a Paperless Workplace Is That Electronic Documents Free up Office Space

As mentioned earlier, you won’t find typical office devices or traditional office supplies in a paperless office. They’re simply not needed. What will you find, then? Clean, minimalist workspaces. And a whole lot of space. Yep, when you get rid of (or at least cut down on) paper, all that other office stuff can go, too.

Imagine, if you will, a large office with only one printer (for the occasional paper need), a small shelf holding all binders and office supplies, and that’s it. The rest is space for desks and people and devices.

Just imagine the things you could do with all that space! You could add a monitor or two. You could keep a pretty potted plant next to those monitors. And since you won’t need that cabinet under your desk to file away paper documents anymore, you could even add a small treadmill or some other type of office-friendly exercise machine to your setup. The whole room could become a zen, calming environment for employees.

Working From Home? A Paperless Home Office Gives You Back Your Living Space

If your kitchen or dining room table is currently doubling as your workspace, going paperless will benefit you even more than at the office. Without piles of paper, folders, and other traditional office materials all about your living space, you won’t feel like your work life is encroaching upon your private life.

A Paperless Office Is a Money Saver, Too

We've previously discussed how a paperless workplace eliminates the need for standard office equipment like scanners, printers, and shredders, as well as standard office supplies like binders, hole punches, and paperclips. Think not only saved space, but saved money! All these items, which you need to buy again and again, cost your office a ton of money. A printer may last a long time, but if it does break, it can make quite a dent.

But what about the paper itself? Sure, you can buy 2,500 sheets of copy paper at Walmart for under $20. And at less than a dollar a pad, your colorful sticky notes habit isn’t likely to break the bank, either. But in the long run, going paperless leads to major savings: On average, every office worker uses 10,000 sheets of paper per year. That’s half a million sheets of paper in a 50-year career!

Increased Efficiency Is Another Benefit of Going Paperless at the Office

Unlike paper documents, digital documents are easy to store in such a way that employees can find and access them again in a matter of seconds. For instance, let’s say you’ve just digitized a paper invoice you received from a partner by scanning it using the Smallpdf Mobile App. Now, you can simply rename the file to include the date of receipt and the name of the business that you received it from (and any other markers you find relevant). This will make your document searchable. Employees can find it in seconds, without having to search through binder after binder.

Speaking of the Smallpdf Mobile App: When you scan a document with it your digital documents are available on all of your devices. You can access them on a desktop or laptop computer, a tablet or phablet, or a smartphone. This makes your documents instantly accessible to all of your employees. A sales rep on the road, or someone working from home can quickly access the information they need, saving everyone lots of time and hassle.

There Are Also Environmental Benefits of Going Paperless

A paperless workplace benefits the environment by reducing paper consumption, as trees grow slowly and produce less paper than you’d think. Plus, it costs quite a bit of energy to turn a tree into paper and ship it to you. Additionally, a tree captures an average of one ton or 2,000 lbs. of carbon dioxide throughout its lifetime. By reducing paper production, you’re contributing to a greener world—literally.

An Eco-Friendly Office Promotes Employer Branding

An added benefit of going paperless and thus becoming more environmentally responsible is that greener companies are perceived as more desirable employers, especially in the eyes of younger workers. Studies have shown that the millennial generation, those born between 1980 and 1996, take companies’ social and environmental commitments into consideration when deciding where to work. Many won’t join a company that doesn’t have strong corporate social responsibility (CSR) values. They’re more likely to feel fulfilled and thus to be loyal to an employer when provided opportunities to make a positive impact socially and environmentally. The same, if not more, counts for Gen Z, who are entering the work force now.

A Paperless Work Environment Provides Access To Global Markets and Talent

A paperless office offers many advantages for attracting employees, regardless of their location. That means that you can create evenly divided teams and consistently hire the best candidate for every position. Employees can access digital documents from any location, making it easier for you to find and hire the best candidate for any available position.

Similarly, going paperless makes it so much easier to work with international customers and partners. For instance, if you provide a service such as web design, you can switch to digital creative briefs and invoices. That way, you make your services available to customers from virtually anywhere. You can also use these digital documents to outsource parts of a full-service solution to other specialists, no matter where they are in the world.

Last but Not Least, a Paperless Office Can Increase Security

Paper documents are subject to a host of threats, such as being:

• misplaced/lost/incorrectly filed,
• thrown away by accident,
• stolen,
• destroyed by a fire, flood, or improper storage (temperature, humidity, etc.)

What’s more, paper documents can easily fall into the wrong hands, even unintentionally. For instance, an employee may simply forget to file a paper document away, revealing potentially sensitive information to anyone who happens to walk by that employee’s desk.

Switching to a paperless office with digital documents eliminates all of these risks. The digital workspace also offers a wider range of security measures. You can implement encrypted servers and in various locations so that there’s essentially no way they could accidentally get lost or destroyed. Also, you can fully control which employees should have full, limited, or no access at all to a digital document.