• Alan Morris, Senior Technical Support Engineer at PaperCut


• 26.07.2024 10:00 am
#technology #fintech

“Another dream: take this whole notion of the paperless office. We’ve been talking about the paperless office basically since I left business school, frankly. And do most people here operate in a paperless fashion? I do personally. Why? Because I’ve gotten tired of carrying a lot of paper in my backpack around when I go on trips… I won’t read it if you don’t send it to me electronically.”

Those words were spoken by Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, back in 2005. During the 20 years I worked at Microsoft as a Software Design Engineer. Steve was a strong proponent of the paperless office, and I was fortunate to be in a position to see and to be able to contribute to this incredible shift. So, what did I learn? I have learned that real change is hard.

Because here we are in 2024, and even though new technologies have finally caught up with Steve’s vision of a paperless office, complete digitisation in the financial services sector certainly hasn't been the overnight transition that it promised to be…especially when it comes to print.

Speaking from the coalface, it’s not the technology that’s at fault. Ease-of-use mechanisms—such as the rapid adoption of tablets and iPads in the early 2000s, followed by the smartphone and, most recently, the rise of QR codes—have all facilitated the easy consumption of content in a digital format.

So what's holding the finance sector – and others - from going paperless? I’ve come to realise since my time at Microsoft that, as with any other seismic shift, the key barrier is human behaviour. And if you are trying to achieve a pivot that relies on people to behave differently, you’ve got something to learn from Steve and the paperless office.

Understanding the psychology of change
Anyone who has ever held a leadership position has encountered employees who won’t alter their behaviour, even when it's a change they theoretically support. And if you look at this from a more macro point of view, we see that this phenomenon is not limited to a workplace setting—take, for example, the issue of sustainability. While the broad scientific and popular consensus is in favour of taking action to mitigate climate change, resistance on an individual level means that societal progress is painfully slow; and that negatively impacts this sector as much as it does the environment.

As a leader, it’s important to note though that resistance doesn’t necessarily reflect opposition. So why won’t people change?

We can perhaps find answers in a lauded presentation Professor Robert Gifford gave at ICAP Colombia University in 2010 on psychological barriers which he termed the “dragons of inaction.”

Gifford argued that for hundreds of thousands of years, the human brain was built for survival in the present, making it difficult for us to process nonlinear problems that accumulate over a long period of time. This means we tend to discount environmental impacts that may happen sometime in the future or in a distant place. In effect, when the problem feels abstract and doesn't affect us directly, we are less motivated to act.

What’s more, we may believe that we don’t have any control over the situation, or that the scale of the problem renders our actions irrelevant. This creates a comfortable cognitive dissonance: after all, how can one plastic straw or printing one extra piece of paper contribute in any meaningful way to global warming?

Another significant challenge is the societal pressure that comes from the behaviour of other people, which plays a huge role in influencing our own actions—that is, the change must become normalised within the culture. If everyone else is driving to work, or continues to print every PowerPoint deck, what’s the point of you changing?

Yet I see these so-called dragons of inaction provide inspiration for how to inspire employees to adopt more environmentally-friendly behaviour in the workplace, including reducing their paper consumption. I certainly saw that Steve’s call for paperless was genuinely reflected in the way he worked, and this encouraged change in others, and I think this can work for your organisation, too.

How to drive behavior change
To successfully implement change throughout any sector, organisation or population, your people must first understand the problem that we’re trying to solve in a concrete, tangible way rather than as an abstract concept.

For instance, when it comes to climate action, this has meant measuring greenhouse gases to identify the major producers of fossil fuels or the source of household emissions. If you want to reduce or eliminate your use of paper, tracking printing is a fundamental step towards gaining control of the paper you’re using—providing you with vital information about who is doing the bulk of the printing, what they are printing, and how many pages are coming out.

Next, it’s important to set a target that feels aspirational, yet achievable, otherwise you risk people giving up before they’ve even begun. With climate change, we weren’t asked to stop global warming. Instead, we were given a target of limiting it to 1.5°C by 2025. Likewise, is the paperless office a worthy goal? Sure! But reframe that challenge as the less-paper office, as opposed to paperless, and you can see how that could help overcome that inertia that prevents real change.

Consider how you present the messaging around the behaviour you are seeking to change. People are more likely to be motivated by intrinsic factors rather than external incentives—so the change must feel attractive and empowering, rather than a personal sacrifice.

People also need to feel that their tiny individual actions can all add up to an enormous impact—which is absolutely the case. For example, heating and cooling account for 20% of household energy use in the United States, so we know that simple fixes like switching to energy-efficient appliances would make a substantial difference. The same is true for every page saved from printing—this is why it's worth setting small, achievable goals even if it's just bringing down your page count by a fraction each month.     

So ask yourself: is there any step in the paper workflow that can be removed? If you can identify just one single change to print less and digitise more, it can result in a much larger impact—with each step pushing your organisation that bit closer to becoming paperless.

As I’ve mentioned, because people are heavily influenced by the behavior of others, the change must be ingrained into the company culture, which can only happen when it comes from the top. Steve Ballmer walked the talk regarding paperless.  So, if your company is going to aim for less paper - or whatever your goal, then it's critical for leadership to take it seriously and set the tone for the entire workplace.

This may mean having regular discussions or communication around the values of the company and how paper reduction aligns with these – and there can be many ways to do this. One experiment designed to increase participation in community recycling discovered the success of the “block leader approach”—an active campaign talking to people one-on-one instead of just sending out a mass email.

A focus on conscious printing
Realistically, I believe there is going to be a need for printing for a long time to come, particularly in certain industries that are document-intensive, like financial services.

But the bottom line is, if we continue only being satisfied with attaining perfection - like the paperless office - we are only setting ourselves up for failure. The more unattainable the goal, the more likely we are to come up against individual resistance.

Thinking about your organisational change like the Less-Paper Challenge is about creating a culture where every person in the workplace takes accountability for their own behavior, is motivated to become part of positive change, and makes conscious decisions daily which add up to real collective progress over time. That's an achievable goal that this sector – and all of those within it - should all be aiming for in 2024 and beyond.