Towards a paperless office.

 

Acting CEO Neville Stankley with the recycling at the Nottingham Storage Facility.

They say transitioning to a paperless office does not happen overnight but last year saw offices all around the world suddenly lock their doors and office workers separated and working from home remotely. Culture Syndicates were not any different and the digital learning curve has been steep. Our staff like many have accumulated vast amounts of files and loose notes and bits of paper, all stacking up on top of each other as the years go by. Emails have been printed off paper clipped and left in trays and never read. What this last year has taught us, and many offices like us, we do not need most of it.

What was most important was already on our shared drives it has taken a pandemic to finally turn completely digital and trust in the software. Recently when we could safely return to our office, we emptied it out and placed it into storage keeping only the essentials. Like anyone who has put something in a box or a loft you learn to live without it. So today when we went to retrieve our items, we found that we no longer require a decade’s worth of printed paper. As you can see above our Acting CEO Neville Stankley is removing the remnants of our paper-filled past towards the recycling bin.

Our pledge going forward is to become much more eco-friendly and the work we have done researching digital alternatives as part of our Culture Recovery Funding will help us to keep to our pledge. We would like to share with you some of our reasons we are going paperless below:

Lower costs. The costs of paper, ink, toner, and printer maintenance are expensive. With cloud storage solutions, such as google drive it makes it easy for our employees to access all the documents they need anytime, on any device and anywhere especially useful for our digital heritage officer who is in China.

 
Protected access. A strong username and password can be more secure than a traditional filing cabinet, too, keeping our most sensitive documents safe. 

Improved office space.  Paper just takes up valuable space large printers and filing cabinets can be replaced by an extra member of staff or precious room for anything else we may need. 

Time-saving. Manually searching through years of files, in a cabinet, to retrieve one document are thankfully a thing of the past. Although be sure to name your files well as terms like ‘miscellaneous’ and ‘stuff pre-2016’ are not helpful!

Accounting costs are lowered. Receiving invoices and statements electronically means they can be instantly dealt with and stored in the appropriate file, along with sending invoices electronically can save on postage costs too.

Remote workers. Our heritage assistants live across the country, so it makes sense that we use electronic means of communication with them our digital methodology keeps us all connected.

We are really looking forward to a new clean and more paperless start to our return to the office which will be in just a few short weeks. But it will be in a new location! So stay tuned to find out where we will soon be based it is all very exciting.

http://culturesyndicates.co.uk