It’s no secret that many businesses want to go greener. While having some recycling options in the office or switching over to LED lighting is an excellent start to going green, it doesn’t impact paper waste that much. At least, not to significant levels.

The paperless office is something many organizations dream of doing, but it rarely happens in reality. Are you frustrated with paperwork coming into your premises and the paper used by your team each day? Check out these five methods for achieving a truly paperless office:

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1. Receive All Documents Electronically

Invoices, contracts, and even brochures are just some of the things that wind up at your business premises each day. The thing is, you have the power to prevent any document-based mail from ending up at your offices.

For a start, contact all the companies that supply your business with goods and services. Demand they stop sending you correspondence by mail and instead contact you electronically via email.

It might surprise you to learn that almost all suppliers can contact you electronically. In fact, they’d prefer that as it saves them money from sending you things in the mail.

2. Deal With Customers Electronically

Despite being in a digital age, many customers still correspond with companies like yours via mail. When customers have queries, the only options you should give them are electronic ones (and voice calls, if applicable to your business).

For example, they can use a web chat application to speak with your customer services team instead of writing them a letter. Or, they can message them via email or social media messaging services such as Facebook Messenger.

3. Get Rid of Your Printers and Photocopiers

Have you ever noticed that people seemingly print out or photocopy stuff all the time? The truth is, your employees don’t need to print anything out or even make paper copies of existing documents.

Anything that comes into your offices should be in an electronic format rather than paper. You can use cloud services like Dropbox to share documents among relevant team members, so there’s no need to print anything out that was ‘borrowed’ from other staff.

4. Write Digital Notes

Paper and pen is the go-to solution for making notes such as to-do lists or noting down messages from callers. However, going paperless doesn’t mean you can no longer write down notes for yourself or messages for other people!

Online note solutions like Evernote are great for teams that want to write down private notes or share them with each other. Of course, there’s also email for letting people know about telephone messages.

5. Sign All Documents Digitally

What happens with contracts, you might ask yourself? Sure, you can create contracts using word processor software like Microsoft Word. But, what happens if you need to sign them and get other people to sign them too?

The solution is simple: digitally sign your documents. There are software solutions that allow you to do that. Alternatively, you could scan your signature and save it as an embeddable image.