Going paperless will save your company thousands of dollars, reduce your effect on the environment, and increase your overall efficiency. Like anything else, however, a paperless office won't be perfect. There are a few challenges of a paperless office that you will face. Fortunately, all of them can be avoided if you know what to do.
Not knowing what to do with future paper documents
Although going paperless will reduce your company's paper use significantly, physical documents aren't going away completely any time soon. Your company will still receive paper documents from business partners, customers and other outside entities. Although this sounds difficult to deal with, this is actually one of the simplest challenges of a paperless office to overcome. Invest in a scanner and scanning software that can integrate your incoming paper into fully manageable digital documents.
The potential for sudden data loss
Although digital storage solutions are incredibly reliable, they aren't perfect. They are susceptible to sudden data loss due to a variety of causes, including inexplicably corrupted files, sudden power loss, accidental hacking, and malicious hacking. Although this sounds scary, data loss is one of the most preventable of all challenges of a paperless office. There are three keys to protecting your data against loss.
Information security
As soon as you go digital, you should be protecting your company's data against malicious hackers. You can do this by creating multiple layers of protection for your data. In addition to the traditional firewall and antivirus security measures, you should also be using the latest encryption technology. This will scramble your data, and the places where it is accessed from, preventing a hacker from reaching it to do any damage.
Employee education
If you don't prepare them for your paperless office, your employees can become data liabilities. Prevent them from being the cause of sudden data loss by letting them know what steps they need to take when handling digital data. This includes backup protocols and security requirements.
Data backups
This should be your ultimate solution to protecting your company's data from sudden loss. When your data is backed up, a corrupted or accidentally deleted file becomes little more than a minor inconvenience. In order to effectively back your data up, the backup copy should be stored somewhere separate from the original copy. To this end, cloud-based storage solutions are extremely effective. Not only do they protect your data against normal data loss causes, but also sudden disasters. Because cloud-based storage solutions are off-site, everything in your building could be destroyed, and you would still have your company's valuable data.
Analog employees
Much of the current workforce has relied primarily on paper for their business activities for decades. It can be jarring to have a sudden shift from physical documents to digital ones. Not only does an individual have to learn new habits, they also have to develop new skills. When an employee isn't comfortable with using a digital document management system, their productivity will inevitably suffer. This detracts from one of the greatest benefits of a paperless office (efficiency).
You can, however, make sure that all of your employees are prepared to get the most out of your paperless office by making them a part of your transition. While you are setting up your new document management system, thoroughly train your employees on how to use it.
Overcome the challenges of a paperless office before they become a problem
Your company's transition into the digital era doesn't have to be bumpy. Protect yourself against a paperless office's biggest challenges by taking the steps that we have discussed above.
