5 Strategies for a Collaborative Paperless Office

Going paperless cuts down on clutter, makes it easy for you to work from anywhere, and reduces your carbon footprint.

Photo: Marc Swarbrick

It’s an obvious step for a working nomad. Unfortunately, it may not be as obvious for your friends, family, colleagues and other contacts with whom you exchange information. As Mark Shead over at Productivity 501 says, “Once a document gets printed out, you’ve broken the paperless life cycle.”

Even if you handle all your personal or business tasks electronically and rarely print documents, you can’t control what happens on the other end. How do you encourage people to join you in a paperless office?

Some people take great joy in sporting a line in their email signature that reads, “Please consider the environment before printing this email.” Sometimes there is a little webdinger or clip-art graphic of a green tree next to the instruction, just in case their readers don’t know what “environment” means.

Can you honestly imagine this approach affecting anyone’s decision to print? Imagine this scenario: someone (let’s call her Frances) has received an email from you (let’s call you Jeffie). Because your email contains some facts and figures Frances needs to present at a business meeting, she hits the print button. But wait! What’s that at the bottom of your signature? Oh my goodness, Jeffie says I shouldn’t print this email because it’s naughty to Mother Earth! Cancel, cancel, cancel! Phew, tragedy averted.

Yeah, right. If your contacts need to print something, they will do so without a second thought. Condescending little edicts in your email signature do two things:

make you look unprofessional
get ignored

Neither of these goes any distance in persuading folks to join you in a paperless office. Does this mean you should give up on trying to affect people’s behavior? Not at all. There’s an easy and elegant solution to the problem. Rather than place the burden on your associates, make it so easy for them to not print your correspondence that they don’t even have to think about it.

5 strategies for getting people to stay paperless:

1. Point, don’t copy.

Instead of sending a long text email, move information online and send a link to the site. (Sure, your recipients could still print out the webpages, but here technological ignorance is on your side: some people still do not know that it’s possible to print a webpage!)

2. Bigger is better.

Use large fonts that are easy to read on-screen. This means Times New Roman, Arial, and Helvetica; never Jazz, Snell Roundhand, or Rockwell Extra Bold, regardless of how artistic you think they make you appear.

3. Change your perspective.

Most paper documents are designed in portrait layout, meaning they are taller than they are wide. Monitors are designed in landscape layout, wider than they are tall, yet because of our early conditioning with paper, we still tend to design documents as if they were going to be printed. For example: two-column layouts, large photos that cross two pages, diagrams that are taller than the screen. In all your communication, use landscape layouts so people don’t have to scroll up and down and are not tempted to print.

4. Set expectations.

When sending any documents or forms, tell the recipients clearly how you expect them to respond. Otherwise, you may get a shock when you receive a multi-page fax or unwieldy snail-mail package. Not only does that defeat the purpose of sending them them the info electronically in the first place, but now you may have to transfer their messy handwritten responses into your computer by hand!

Say something like, ”This is an editable PDF. Please save it to your hard drive, open it with Acrobat Reader, and click on the fields to input your information. Then save the completed document and return it to me as an email attachment.” Obviously, you will not have to spell it out word-by-word like this for many of your contacts. Adjust your style for the lowest common denominator.

5. Keep it simple, stupid.

Make your emails brief and to the point so people are not tempted to print them out to read during their bus commute or dentist appointment.

If you make it convenient for people to collaborate with you in a paperless office, they will. Choosing not to print an email or document is a baby step. Millions of people taking baby steps might eventually lead to a paperless world. What would that look like?