How Can Technology Revolutionise Paper Waste in Your Office?

Many offices are now trying to become paperless in an effort to become more sustainable as well as more secure. There are many ways to achieve this, but technology is at the heart of some of the very best solutions.

In this article, the team behind VMFree, a cloud-based visitor management system take a look at the different forms of technology that are revolutionising paper waste in your office to help you reduce your environmental impact and make your office practises more efficient.

Digitising documents

There was once a time where all documents were paper based and kept in filing cabinets or strewn across desks. However, this has proved to be incredibly risky as it means things can fall into the wrong hands or get lost.

It has also been incredibly inefficient, with employees spending huge amounts of time sifting through different files to find the specific thing that they are looking for. That is why most documents are created and stored electronically and any paper documentation that arrives is scanned and saved in a digital format.

By doing this, you can enhance the security of your business as well as making all members of staff more efficient as they can now simply search for the name of a document in a few clicks and have what they want in front of them.

Visitor management software

In the past, when visitors arrived at your business, they would sign in using a logbook kept on a reception desk. This was not very secure and also had the potential to lead to long waiting times and mistakes being made.

Visitor software has transformed the way that visitors are dealt with when they enter your business, as they now sign in through a tablet answering the personalised questions that you have put together for them.

This gives you a much better opportunity to capture important data and you can take photos of your visitor so that they can wear a personalised badge during their visit to help enhance your security measures. It can also be incredibly important in the case of an emergency as you will have real time information of exactly who is in the building and whether they have been safely evacuated.

As visitor management software is completely digital, it can eliminate the need for a sign in book. This means the information of all visitors is kept completely private and there are less concerns about how the book should be destroyed when it is no longer needed. In addition to this, digital sign in methods tend to be more efficient, save time and there are fewer concerns about reading someone else's handwriting.

Visitor management software can be personalised so that it fits in with the branding of your business and gives you the opportunity to ask the questions that are most pertinent to you. It will also alert staff members that an unauthorised visitor has arrived so that they can react quickly and avoid any unnecessary delays.

Online communication

Online communication has now taken the place of many written formats, which is saving huge amounts of paper waste. Whether it is an email, virtual meeting or video call, there are now many different ways to communicate effectively that take the place of notes and memos, so that scrap paper becomes a thing of the past.

Technology has changed so many elements of our lives and it has had a huge impact on offices around the world. Not only does it make us more efficient, but it removes the paper that has dominated office environments for decades, making us more environmentally friendly, as well as ensuring that all sensitive information is now much more secure than it ever was before.