Printing is often seen as just another office function that employees don’t think twice about, much like making a cup of coffee or taking another pen from the stockroom. It’s often done in such small quantities that you soon lose track of how much you’re actually printing.
But here’s the thing - the average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of paper each year! (Mashable UK). Depending how often you print, that might either sound like a lot or a little, so let’s put it into perspective.
A piece of paper is usually around 0.1mm thick. That means 10,000 pieces of paper is 1000mm or in other words, 1 metre high. This still might not sound like much, and maybe for one person, it isn’t. But once you start scaling that up, you begin to realise just how much paper is being used each year. If your company has 100 employees with the average paper usage remaining at 10,000 pages a year, then suddenly your company’s paper pile is around the same height as a 27 floor building (100m).
What’s worse is that 45% of print-outs are binned the same day! (The Guardian)
Despite paper being recyclable, the production process uses an enormous amount of energy and water and a lot of the paper still ends up in landfill. Not only is this unsustainable, but it is also expensive.
A lot of processes that involve print have a digital alternative, and that means print can be reduced saving both cost and the environment!
The trouble with trying to reduce print in any given company is making sure all of the employees follow the practice of reducing print and paper usage by adopting digital processes. In many senses, it’s not enough to just put the processes in place, there has to be an element of change management in order to get people to stop printing.
Identifying how much your team prints
Thankfully, there are tools available to help identify how much different users and departments print in your company, CompleteView User Analytics for example.
But as mentioned above, this is only half the battle, even if you can identify the heavy printing processes, you have to make the employees realise how much they’re printing and try to put it in real terms.
There are different ways of doing this, from tighter printing policies to briefings and meetings to showing the stats and gamification opportunities to make people aware of what they print and how they can reduce it.
Print Awareness Tool (PAT) - Making people aware of how much they print
The Print Awareness Tool was created by Xerox’s European Research Centre - it is a simple desktop widget with the aim to make users aware of how much they are printing in an attempt to drive cultural change from a user level, rather than management.
It uses the principles of ‘gamification’ to try and appeal to peoples' competitive instincts and make desired behaviour something they actually want to do.
Effectively, the tool shows users their print history, key printing stats and how they compare with their peer group, their department and the entire organisation. The tool then uses a flower graphic, which provides simple ‘at a glance’ feedback on how they’re doing that month and as they print more pages, the petals fall off the flower.
On top of this, the tool suggests helpful hints for ways that a user could change their behaviour further.
By combining the use of the Print Awareness Tool and an insight into how much employees are printing in your company, it’s possible to drive change and reduce the amount that your company prints, leading to cost and sustainability benefits.
Learn more about the Print Awareness Tool here.