About a year ago I was in a meeting where a person proclaimed that their company would be ‘going paperless’ by Q3 that year. Everyone agreed. About six months later I saw the same employees of that company filling a corner print shop with piles and piles of client onboarding packets printed out on reams of paper. And I realized that for all their hopes and dreams, they had for the most part relied on an old, tired office machine that finally gave up the ghost.
Most organizations will continue to print for the foreseeable future. The paperless office is not yet a reality. The technology and workflow processes that support a fully digital office are not yet in place and are some time away. And “5 years away” is how the “paperless office” has been for around 30 years now.
The myth we keep believing
I really love how powerful and impressive the digital workflows are today for business use on a daily basis. By being stored online in the cloud (even within your own business’s own work flow/process) they can be accessed by whomever whenever from within the business-focused apps & platforms as well as from within the numerous channels of communication or ‘threads’ created while making use of business-focused features of social media platforms. (For example: There can be a massive amount of back & forth or communication within the individual ‘thread’ of a single chat or discussion that’s currently ‘in progress’—then, that entire ‘thread’ of a single chat can be referenced by all concerned while having a Slack message sent back & forth between all the relevant people within that single ‘thread’ of chat as well). Digital contracts, etc. can be signed off in an instant & sent electronically for the digital signatures of other people in an instant as well.
This scenario happens because most offices still treat printing as an afterthought. As long as someone has paper and ink, then printing must be under control. In reality, printing should be something that is managed, like any other office function. It should be something that is designed into the fabric of an office, with systems in place to manage all of the aspects of printing. The truth is that if you haven’t designed and implemented a good printing system then printing is something that will eventually become a problem. When it does, it will be a big problem, with lots of opportunity for things to go wrong. In the meantime, there is the day to day problem of dealing with the current state of affairs. The paper jam that requires intervention, the search for more paper, and the occasional lost printer connection that requires the IT department to fix.
So what still gets printed?
A contract that needs to be signed.
- Contracts and legal agreements, because wet signatures still carry genuine weight in many jurisdictions and plenty of clients simply prefer the physical version
- Invoices and financial documents for clients who request paper records, especially in industries like construction, manufacturing, or healthcare, where paper trails aren’t optional
- Onboarding packets, policy documents, and training materials that people demonstrably retain better on paper (the research on this is more robust than most digital evangelists want to acknowledge)
- Client-facing presentations and proposals, where a printed document sitting on the table signals preparation and professionalism in a way that a shared screen sometimes just doesn’t
BLOCKPLACEHOLDER
I used to be a die-hard digital person and used to think that a PDF closed in a browser tab was better than a printed document left behind at a meeting. But there is something about holding something physical that keeps working for you long after you’ve left a meeting. It was only when I lost a client because the competitor left behind something physical to read that I realized how powerful a printed document could be.
The Device Actually Matters
Block a large number of pages every week? So for most businesses, the major consideration in choosing an office printer will be the purchase price. They’re looking for the cheapest printer – they’ll move to a new office and take the old printer with them. They have no idea of the massive differences between the speeds, print quality, paper handling, and running costs of the various models. And these differences are all very large when printing two hundred pages per week.
| Document type | What matters most | Common mistake |
| Client proposals | Print quality, sharp text and graphics | Using a budget home printer for professional materials |
| Contracts and invoices | Reliability and consistent output | Ignoring paper jam frequency and maintenance history |
| Onboarding documents | Volume capacity, fast print speed | Underestimating how often new hires start in batches |
| Reports and financial summaries | Duplex printing, cost per page | Not factoring in long-term toner and paper costs |
The truth of the matter is that there are large differences between printers and when you are buying a printer for business use these differences are very important. A printer that is only occasionally used may well be a cheap consumer-grade printer that you brought home from the shop and dumped in the corner of an office. But for daily use a cheap consumer-grade printer is likely to be a disaster. It will be slow, it will jam frequently, it will produce very poor quality print, and it will waste a lot of paper.
A small thing with outsized consequences
The kitchen of a restaurant is another great analogy. No one ever goes to a restaurant to look at the kitchen (except perhaps on occasion to abhor the mess and filth that exists). However, the kitchen of a restaurant is another place where problems have the potential to affect the front-of-house service very quickly and adversely. Most importantly, while the kitchen of a restaurant is out of sight and out of mind until a problem exists, it very quickly becomes the focal point of attention of everyone in the restaurant once a problem has been identified (e.g. the kitchen is broken, it is producing poor quality food).
Operational readiness is boring. Until it isn’t.
Paper is the same as an unexpected hospital visit. You can’t prepare for a crisis like that. Inevitably printed documents appear out of the blue. They are an urgent contract signed just in time. A report that must be presented to an auditor who is waiting at your office. A meeting agenda distributed to attendees just before a 9 min start time. It is always a disaster and never on a quite Tuesday when all is running smoothly and on track.
So what actually changes if you take this seriously?
- Audit what your team actually prints across a full month. The number will probably surprise you, and not in the direction you’re expecting.
- Match the machine to your real volume and quality requirements, not the optimistic version of those requirements.
- Stop treating the printer as optional infrastructure. It isn’t. It never really was.
All of this is a long wind to say that digital workflows are fantastic but paper will always have a certain amount of weight. Accepting that, and having your office function as a finely-tuned machine to produce physical copies of things on the fly when required is a tall order but a very reasonable thing to strive for.
Which, given everything, seems like a pretty reasonable ask.
