There are a lot of different ways to reduce print costs: changing print hardware, enforcing stronger print policies, changing processes, reviewing and possibly changing your MPS provider, encouraging cultural changes and awareness etc.
While most of these are good options to consider, some of them include a high-upfront cost and provide a longer-term ROI and cost reduction. That’s great, but it’s not always ideal, and for this reason, we’re going to consider the last thing on the list; encouraging cultural change and awareness.
Sometimes considered a HR function, company culture is a key way to encourage change in the business, and it applies to printing as well. The challenge is to change the way people think about printing, changing it from a necessary function without much thought to a considered part of a process that has consequences and alternatives.
The key here is to make people think about what they’re printing and why, and furthermore, it’s about providing alternatives to printing.
It’s likely for many people in the business that printing is a habit that has been engrained from processes that involve printing and filing a document, or printing a document to sign, and step one of reducing the cost through cultural change and awareness is understanding why people print.
Here are six of the reasons that people print in the workplace:
- To store or file a document
- To annotate a document
- To develop their thinking
- To read a document
- To print for other people (often for collaboration or for someone to sign it)
- To write notes for others
Now the important thing to note about all of these reasons for printing is that there are digital alternatives. For example, rather than storing a document physically, you can use secure cloud storage and rather than printing for others, you can share a digital file that can even legally be electronically signed. You can learn more about why people print and the digital alternatives here.
Now you know why people print, you have to consider what you can do to help change the culture of printing and increase awareness of how much people print.
For changing the culture, it could be as simple as briefing a team or department on the digital alternatives available - after all, starting small and scaling up is a good way to go. Start with processes in mind as well, for example, if you know lots of one-time print-outs are printed for meetings or briefings, consider how to cut this out and spread the word.
Spreading the message is another step in changing the printing culture. Keep in mind that the end goal is reducing cost, but not everyone will care about how much money can be saved. For some, the idea that reducing paper and printing usage can be good for the environment is a stronger message than one about cost, after all, it’s not the individual person that is paying the cost of printing.
In order to spread the message, approach those that are taking the cultural change on board and work with them to share the message with others.
This takes us onto awareness. It’s not always enough to just tell people what they could be doing differently, sometimes it’s important to show them. This can be done in different ways, from encouraging people to actually look at how much they print when they’re printing through to sharing print analytics and using specific print awareness tools.
Tools such as the Print Awareness Tool can also help to make employees aware of how much they’re printing and can hopefully help to reduce the amount being printed. The Print Awareness Tool uses the principles of 'gamification' to appeal to peoples' competitive instinct and make desired behaviour something they actively want to do.
How does all of this reduce print costs?
On the whole, changing the culture related to print should help to show people that printing isn’t always necessary and that there are better ways to print. If this is taken onboard, then the reduction of printing will save costs in a few different ways: reducing paper usage, reducing toner usage and lowering the cost of running the printers from maintenance to general running costs.