Space in an office environment often comes at a premium and property costs represent a significant proportion of business costs. So how can you reduce the space that you need in your place of work?
A smart approach to document management is fundamental in achieving a smaller amount of room needed as document storage often occupies the largest amount of room in an office.
Back scanning and digital archiving is a key step to take when focusing on space-saving and is especially important to those organisations that must save copies of documentation for a minimum period of years, e.g. legal firms. By scanning and storing all documents digitally, you can save money renting space for storage and at the same time improve document accessibility using system search functionalities.
Another space-saving method to reduce the amount of paper in your organisation is to embrace mobile working, which will reduce the overall number of work stations required as a portion of employees will always be out of the office. Mobile technology has advanced rapidly in the past decade, as has the development of cloud computing applications, making it completely possible for employees to work from home or whilst travelling. It is vital that a properly managed document infrastructure is maintained so that mobile working is done effectively and efficiently so that employees can continue to be productive no matter where they are.
A further way to reduce document use is to use web-based applications to do tasks that would traditionally be paper-based. There are a large number of applications out there that can be used to share data between an organisation and its clients via the cloud. Applications to consider using might include:
- Google Docs (document sharing and collaborating)
- Dropbox (file sharing)
- Trello (project management)
- Evernote (digital note taking)
- PayPal (fund transferal)