Issue #0724/1 - People can change their habits but frequently don’t want to or are not motivated to do so. A little thought, planning and communication could change print usage patterns, reduce costs and save raw materials.
Die Hard is a phrase holding a certain degree of relevance right at the moment – up to version 4.0 with a 52-year-old unwilling to throw in the towel - and there is a version 5 apparently in the planning.
Determination, demonstrated in abundance by John McCLane, is the characteristic likely to cause us to change our habits where technology is concerned.
When it comes to printing habits, there is significant potential for cutting costs within corporations, enterprises, businesses and in the home, just by being prepared to think about the implications of our habits, how we might change those habits and communicating best practice to staff or family members. But we need a degree of determination to do it.
Is age/generation part of the problem?
‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks’ – as the saying goes. Wrong. I firmly believe that there are ways to change behaviour and habits whatever the age, culture or social background. Some methods may be more drastic than others but Mr Pavlov seemed to get on OK with his dogs and there are plenty of ageing mobile phone users on the planet. Perhaps it takes time but habit change is possible.
However, we don’t have to look far to see that the younger generations are more comfortable with technology than the older generations. It stands to reason – what we grow up with, we are most comfortable with.
Perhaps there is resistance to reading documents on-screen amongst older users partly because eyesight changes with age. Small text on a screen can become difficult to read, making use of a PC uncomfortable. So, how about making it easier, more intuitive and more attractive to have larger text on the PC screen?
But, age/generation is no barrier to technology acceptance. I again mention my mother, who bought a digital camera, laptop computer and inkjet AiO printer at the age of 78. She has learned well, even winning an award at the local university as learner of the month and the system is in daily use!
Is culture/environment part of the problem?
Doubtless, people fit in with the culture and environment around them. Children growing up in a technology-rich environment absorb its use easily as they grow with the technology, while older people can adapt to a degree of technology given time and motivation. Hence, the tendency for older people to prefer reading from paper rather than a CRT or LCD screen, while younger people are happy even with a mobile phone screen!
Today’s culture has been described in terms of the ‘global village’. We see people moving around the world for a variety of reasons and, where there is a desire and motivation for them to do so, there is no barrier to adopting the culture of their chosen country or, indeed, adopting new technology in a remote area.
So, what is it that motivates people to change?
All too often, we are motivated by laziness and a reward mentality, by an unwillingness to push that extra step that might have a beneficial impact on someone else but not have a measurable or discernable benefit to us. Change means effort.
This is why a printer user will not enter the printer properties, from the driver’s ‘Print’ dialog box, in order to switch on the duplex printing function, or to set the printer into draft mode for documents that need to be printed only for the purposes of reference and are transitory, expected to be destroyed almost immediately. It is all too much work, too much effort, takes too much time for too little (perceived) reward.
All we want is to be able to click ‘Print’ and have the finished document on our desk. Why should the individual in a large organisation have to think about how to minimise print costs? Minimising print costs is not the user’s responsibility; the user is not (necessarily) the budget holder; the user will not necessarily benefit from a change in printing practices.
People are only resistant to change when they perceive that the new order will be detrimental to them. Take trade unions for example. Their purpose in life is to protect their members from unfair practices by employers. And, quite rightly so – many employers attempt to exploit employees in their attempt to make ever-increasing profits.
Most individuals are looking for an easy, comfortable and familiar life. To illustrate this with a personal anecdote – the ringtone I have on my mobile phone is ‘Danger Zone’ (Kenny Loggins’ soundtrack from Top Gun, not Gwen Stefani). Part of the reason for this is to remind me that close to the edge is where opportunity lies, I’m all too inclined to prefer things to be familiar, safe and comfortable.
Deliberately setting out to learn new skills can be uncomfortable. Learning how to use new equipment can be the same. Parting with the familiar pushes us outside our comfort zones.
TCPglobal has made comment in the dim and distant past about a company that was taken over by a competitor and, when the personnel were merged into common premises, individual workers brought their printers with them. Separating the workers from their printers proved to be an impossible task even when those printers were old.
In printing terms, most changes to work practices would not really have a personal effect on the individual at all but would benefit the organisation and – in theory at least – anything that benefits the organisation ultimately benefits the employees. If employees are trained and given guidance on cost-saving techniques, they will adopt them regardless of age, cultural background, etc.
To take the issue a little further up the chain, often it is lethargy and inertia at management levels that is the reason for un-changing working practices. Perhaps at this point, it is age that is part of the problem.
While accountants are always pushing for reductions in costs, how often do they look at the print practices within the organisation? How often do they go to management and ask for a review of the print practices (as opposed to a hardware or infrastructure review)? Company culture can be changed.
Without intending to present this as a complete list of potential for making savings, here are a few obvious points that make use of fairly common functions of the devices available to us:
Don’t print
Is it necessary to print that document? Especially if it is an email, there is unlikely to be good reason for printing it. Emails tend to be very wasteful on paper – either a whole sheet of paper is used for what is frequently just a few lines of text or multiple sheets are used because the email has a lengthy conversation history attached below the current message.
So, not printing emails can save significantly on paper and on the page count of your printer.
Remember, as the page count increases, so the maintenance intervention approaches. Bringing the maintenance intervention forwards for the sake of a large number of pages, with low levels of information content and page coverage and which could have been read digitally, is very wasteful and expensive.
I have always been impressed by one particular customer whose email signature includes a note that appears at the bottom of emails that currently says, “Stay Green - Keep it onscreen!” Previous messages have included, “Save a tree - don’t print me”.
Printing emails can also be very wasteful on time – by the time the email is sent to print, printed and available on the desk to begin reading, the individual could have read it and probably responded to it before moving on to the next task.
There may also be other documents that do not need printing, potentially including: drafts of letters, memos (in fact, most memos shouldn’t need printing at all these days, the message can be conveyed to most people by email – or how about using SMS messaging for urgent memos?), status reports or invoices. However, printing of some of these documents may be justified in order to provide a paper-trail for accounting or management purposes in organisations with minimal digital document archiving facilities but it may be that only one copy is required for the physical archives rather than three or four for distribution plus the archive copy.
Print duplex
Why not set printers to print in duplex as standard? There may be some annoyance initially but users will quickly get used to the fact that their documents will be printed duplex unless they delve deep into the driver settings to turn it off. It would be better to have to delve deep to turn duplexing off than to turn it on!
In this way, documents that benefit from duplexing are done so automatically and documents that are transitory and of low significance are printed duplex by default without the user needing to make specific provision for duplex printing. From the other perspective, while most documents are printed using minimal quantities of paper, for the few documents that specifically need simplex production, the user can specify simplex printing manually.
Print N-up
Sometimes, printing two pages to each A4 sheet of paper is a suitable way of reducing paper costs. This is perhaps particularly relevant to emails that do need to be printed; drafts of documents where the user feels that it will be easier to follow the thread of the message on paper; or, perhaps, documents that the user wishes to review out of the office environment (on a train or aeroplane for instance).
Print booklet
There may also be times when taking the concept of N-up printing one step further into booklet printing is appropriate.
For instance, insurance companies like us to take our travel insurance policy with us while travelling. These can run to 40 or 50 pages without batting an eyelid! Printing this in booklet format reduces the number of sheets of paper to 10 or 12 and reduces the weight and bulk of the document for carrying.
Again, documents for review out of the office would clearly benefit from this approach.
We made some estimates some time ago that suggested a saving on paper costs of around 36% could be achieved just by duplexing as many documents as possible, easily justifying the existence of the duplex unit.
If booklet printing is implemented for suitable documents, some organisations may be able to add substantially to those savings.
Print in black only
At a time when the message is clear – colour printing increases the readability and memorability of the document – we may be able to conclude that not all colour documents actually need to be printed in colour every time.
Take archive copies for example. It is one thing to print an invoice in colour for the customer but do the records copies need to be colour? I don’t think so.
Now – this is very much a case of ‘do as I say, not as I do’ because my records copies of invoices are printed in colour. Why? Simple – it would mean sending the job to print twice, hunting around for the ‘print in black only’ command for the archive copies. It uses precious time. At least they are inkjet prints not laser!
This emphasises how many of our printing practices are actually hardware related and we are in the hands of the manufacturers where those are concerned.
In actual fact, it can be very difficult to direct the printer to print in mono only and it certainly is not intuitive – but then, printer manufacturers would far rather we printed as much as possible in colour because it means more profit for them!
So, could we not have a function in the driver of colour printers that allows the user to select ‘Original in colour, copies in black only’? Many printers offer the facility to pick a cover page or a sheet of headed paper from a different paper source to that used for continuation pages so why not ‘Copies in black only’?
Within larger organisations there is scope for document auto-routing systems so that the user does not need to think about how and where the document should be printed. The system could operate a range of functions such as: printing long emails in 2-up, duplex (four pages per sheet of paper) and in draft mode on the lowest cost printer in the organisation; or not printing emails at all; printing internal documents to a mono printer with low cost per page; etc., etc. up the line to draft brochures printed on an inkjet printer and final brochure materials printed in best quality on a colour laser printer (or glossy inkjet media).
Whatever the solutions, it is wasteful practices and lack of thought that cause print costs to be higher than they need to be. Printer owners need to review how their printers are used and what users require of their print facilities – this will provide valuable insight and offer guidance regarding which devices are most appropriate for the situation.
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