It is an irrefutable fact that average global temperatures have been rising. From burning fossil fuels to thousands of cargo ships to the car we take to work, everything necessary to sustain modern lifestyle is having an adverse effect on this planet. Each year we move further down this rabbit hole and break new records to no end. Every major country recorded their warmest year in 2014 and the number of extreme weather events continues to go up.
Sadly, reversing this terrible ordeal isn’t as simple as sending a Snapchat image to your friend across the country. It’s taken several years for us to reach this point of natural calamity and it will take several more for things to begin normalizing. But this requires drastic and persistent steps across the globe in every facet of our lives.
A greater part of your day is spent on work; roughly around 90,000 hours of your life. But more shocking is not how much we work, but the way we utilize natural resources while doing it.
Despite there being an average of 3 digital devices per person in the modern workplace, our habit of recklessly using paper is still rampant. Not only are we contributing to deforestation, but most of us also don’t realize that the hidden cost of using paper is almost 31 times the cost of purchasing it. Once you add storage, copying, printing, and recycling into the mix, things look quite different.
Citigroup, a large financial services company, determined that if each employee used double-sided copying to conserve just one sheet of paper each week, the firm would save $700,000 each year. So there’s a substantial economic gain in the reduction of paper usage.
Another factor that’s overlooked is our view of the source of paper, a tree, as something benign and easy to replace. 400 reams of paper are equivalent to 1.25 acres of pine forest absorbing carbon dioxide for a year. And it takes 1.5 cups of water to create a single sheet of paper. Combine this with the fact that 45% of paper used in a single day in the office is trashed the same day, and you get a compounding effect of several valuable resources that are ruthlessly wasted.
So Why Do We Still Use Paper?
If you’re looking for a complicated answer, there isn’t one. Call it our fascination with something physical/tangible, but paper as a medium of information still holds great appeal for internal office use as their glossy, artistic counterparts do in the realm of sales. Small business owners still use paper to manage calendars (13 %), projects (32 %), to-do lists (38 %), and time tracking (23 %).
Combine this with the amount of sensitive company data segregated between several different digital applications and devices, and about a quarter of your administrative staff simply ends up managing such data 50% of their time.
The Solution? Bring Everyone On The Same Page
And by that we mean a digital page. In order to reduce the negative effects of your paper consumption on the environment, while increasing productivity, you must go digital. And chances are that you’ve already achieved that goal for the most part; albeit inefficiently. You see, today, everyone in your company owns a smartphone, and 74% of them utilize their personally owned devices, on a variety of different applications, to carry out office work. Why not capitalize on this behavior and empower your workforce to be more productive?
If your solution to this issue involves creating a mobile application for internal office use to streamline information-disseminating and administrative processes between employees, you’re doing it right. But if that means hiring new IT staff, buying expensive new equipment and spending upwards of 24 weeks just to set up an application for a single kind of platform, you’re doing it wrong.
An easier way is to opt for an Enterprise Mobility solution which providing a one-size-fits-all answer to fit any business requirement. With Makeen transform, a single person can set up a high-quality mobile application using a standard laptop and a web browser within hours. Since the entire system is custom-built for business purposes, prior programming knowledge is not required. Through a simple application designer, any business person can create an application by dragging and dropping items and control buttons on an empty canvas and have it run natively on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone without compatibility issues.
Most of all, it’s fully capable of running offline to facilitate off-site employee productivity.
