Photo by Dario Seretin on Unsplash
No matter how many changes you make as a business to try to move towards a paperless office, there will always be someone who doesn’t get on board. Perhaps it’s from habit, or they prefer a physical print-out. Despite this, companies are looking for ways to discourage printing, to reduce the costs of paper, ink, energy and printer wear and tear.
There are lots of steps that businesses start with to reduce printing and move toward a paperless office, including scanning, filing scanned documents, sharing documents on the crowd, and improving efficiency by selling unused ink and toner to Sell Toner. Unfortunately, despite these measures, some people need more encouragement to change their behavior.
Eliminate personal printers. Each printer in the workplace must be stocked with ink and paper, and be maintained. That can add up. Instead, change to a shared printer, but don’t tuck it away in a corner. Keep the printer near the office manager or the person whoever is in charge of maintaining them. People who can be seen printing too often will self-regulate over time.
Have people print their jobs at the printer itself. People often forget that they’ve printed something and print it out again. Use a virtual print queue so the person has to be at the printer before their job will actually be printed, so they have to be there to get it.
Use printer policies. Reduce late-night printing, large print runs, and heavy use of color. Use printer servers and other printer management controls to limit things like this. You could even implement different policies for different levels of the company.
Change the default setting on all the printers from single-sided to double-sided. People won’t think about changing the default before they print, so set all your printers to print double-sided unless specified otherwise. Doing this can save a huge amount of paper. Other useful settings to save ink include grayscale, draft mode, and shrink to fit.
Track individual use of printers. You can use managed print services to monitor the individual use of printers. Printer use often mysteriously drops a lot when use is tracked like this. You can share people’s use stats with them, and the shock of seeing just how much paper they use might encourage them to change their habits.
Use a chargeback system to account for costs. These systems let you assign costs per printers so you can attribute low costs to the efficient printers that you want people to use, and higher costs to the less efficient ones that you don’t want them to use.
Reduce margins and typeface sizes. Smaller fonts and narrower margins mean you can get more content onto one side of the paper, meaning fewer sheets will be needed for printing.
Use thinner paper. Paper comes in many thicknesses. You don’t need quality inkjet or laser paper for everyday printing. Thinner, cheaper paper does the job just fine for most printing tasks within an office and will work in both inkjet and laser printers.