With global warming becoming an increasingly real threat to people everywhere, businesses are doing more and more to help improve the environment. Many major manufacturers are turning to alternative and green energies to reduce carbon emissions, but even smaller businesses are doing what they can to reduce pollution and waste.
One way that many businesses are working toward a more sustainable future is by going paperless. While this does have a lot of benefits in terms of waste reduction and reducing the number of trees that need to be cut, there are also some good economic reasons for doing this. By going paperless a company can reduce its overhead and improve documentation. By moving toward the digitization of documents by switching to online or PDF documents, companies can become more efficient and environmentally friendly.
What is a paperless office?
A paperless office is a type of business policy that means that a business will reduce and eventually get rid of the necessity of paper documents. This is difficult because one of the most important parts of the business and modern companies is how they document and keep their documents. This is why a transition is needed. Fortunately, there are ways to change this and make your office go paperless. By switching documents to PDF formats and using a PDF editor to keep track of and manage documents, a business will be better able to create a plan to go paperless.
Plan for a paperless environment
The first step in a plan to go paperless is to admit that a plan is needed. For any big transition, a business will need some sort of plan of action. After the plan is established, a process will need to be made. One of the most important things to do in a process of going paperless is to decide what you will switch to. There are many ways to keep your documents digitally.
The most common way is to use PDFs. This is because PDFs are a type of document that is versatile and useful to people across a wide range of industries. This is partially due to the fact that PDFs were created for such an eventuality. So, in some ways, PDFs are just fulfilling their primary role. After you have identified what you will switch to, you will need to understand which tools will be needed. For PDFs, this means a PDF editor.
If you are looking to switch to PDFs instead of paper, then you will need a PDF editor. Fortunately, there is no shortage of quality PDF editing programs that you could choose from. Some of the most famous and popular ones include Smallpdf, PDFelement, Adobe Acrobat, and Lumin PDF. Any of these are a good choice but when looking for PDF editors there are a few things to consider.
Firstly, there is the cost. This should not be a factor if you intend to go paperless since the money you save from not using paper and storing and maintaining them will offset at the very least part of the cost but even still you should check what the price of PDF editors are. Secondly and more importantly, you should investigate the tools that they offer and see what your company needs in terms of going paperless and other tasks that need to be completed.
Locate problem areas
Another part of going paperless is looking for problem areas or areas that might be difficult to go paperless in.
One such would be secure documents. Sometimes we have files from clients or patients or students that need to be kept secure. For this, we can use a PDF editor with an encrypt PDF feature to protect the PDF. Or if we need to archive the data, we can use the archive PDF tool to keep the file or files safe. Security is not the only issue when it comes to going paperless.
There are many areas that could be problems relative to the type of business and organization that your company has, but what is important is to make a plan and understand the potential challenges that you may or may not face in your attempt to go paperless.
Create and implement training for staff
Once you have decided which way to go and what areas could be potentially problematic going forward, it’s time to train your people. This can have many layers. Firstly, they need to understand why and how to go paperless.
They must understand and buy into the vision of a paperless workspace. From there you could organize trainings on how to work with online PDF editors. By giving them the means to go paperless themselves, things will get a lot easier. There is often some hesitation and maybe some groans from employees when it comes to going paperless due to the amount of change.
The shift to a paperless environment will ultimately lead to a more stress-free environment so it is truly a positive for people who work in an office to deal with clutter and papers all day.
Go paperless with Lumin PDF
There are many great tools when it comes to going paperless and PDF editors are one of those tools. Not all PDF editors are equal though and some offer some specific tools that can make the transition to going paperless much easier. One of these is Lumin PDF.
Lumin PDF is a great PDF editor and a useful tool in its own right but in addition to all the standard tools a PDF editor can offer, Lumin PDF also offers an additional tool that makes things easier. With Lumin PDF you can work and edit PDFs from Google Drive directly.
This is important because in the drive to go paperless, you can use Google Drive as an online storage space for our scanned documents or future digital documents. Then you can use Lumin PDF to directly access and work with these documents. This means that you will not only be paperless but also will have made your work more efficient and easier to do.
