Companies Seek to End Their Offices’ Paper Chase

Paper--it’s the staff of office life, the glue of human communications.

Chances are, your desk at work brims with it, your mailbox overflows and your file cabinets bulge. From business cards to Post-it notes, it’s hard to imagine working without smooth, cool paper.

But wait. Wasn’t the computer age heralded as the coming of the paper-free era? Weren’t e-mails and videoconferencing hookups going to make poky mailings and cumbersome reports archaic?

That time is still far off at most workplaces. If anything, we’re swimming in more paper during the computer age than any other time in history.

Yet a few companies are beginning to sideline paper. Cost savings are scant since paper is cheap, and environmental concerns aren’t dominant. Rather, certain that electronic is better, these paper-free pioneers are testing the waters of a whole new way to work.

“Paper is the pony express, it’s worse than the pony express,” asserts Michael Radcliff, chief information officer at Toledo, Ohio-based Owens Corning. “It can take an eternity to communicate or make a decision via paper.”

Owens Corning, a maker of building materials and glass composites, is probably the major U.S. company most wedded to the concept of the paper-free office. And Radcliff is one of its most devout converts.

He gleefully shows a visitor an office nearly devoid of paper--where file drawers rattle and a bare desk sports little more than a laptop, telephone and coffee mug.

“We use paper as a convenience item, not as a way of doing business,” says Radcliff, waving a three-ring notebook where he keeps his “work-in-progress”--papers that are used, perhaps filed electronically, and then thrown out.

The company believes that communicating almost entirely electronically will speed decision-making and customer dealings--boosting productivity by 1% a year.

Walk around the company’s bright new headquarters and you’ll see other signs of the paper-free effort: videoconference rooms with special “softboard” screens where a lecturer’s handwritten notes are automatically transmitted to any connected laptop; a scarcity of printers and copiers. Paper calendars and Post-its are discouraged. Next to go: all paper forms.

Still, the company’s attack on paper hasn’t been easy. “Some are dragging their feet a little bit,” says spokeswoman Kelli Wilkerson, admitting that she’s a “little afraid” of the softboards.

A year ago, the company began urging its 1,200 headquarters employees to leave electronic telephone messages for each other, instead of using the ubiquitous pink paper “While You Were Out” forms. But the company is still buying the paper version--for now.

Other companies--Alcoa, AT&T;, Mitsubishi Electric and BankAmerica Corp.--that are leading the way toward an electronic workplace are also finding that it’s tough prying workers from their paper.

As part of its “Paper-wise” campaign, Alcoa has offered dozens of seminars and tutoring sessions to coax employees into using their computers more to store information and communicate with each other.

“People feel uncomfortable when they don’t have paper in their hand,” says Jan Scites, intranet and Internet director at AT&T;, which is winnowing out faxes, printers, printed newsletters and forms.

After all, not only is paper tangible and portable, it’s easy to use. Paper doesn’t crash, and you don’t have to worry about whether yours is compatible with somebody else’s.

It’s also as reassuringly familiar as the yellow No. 2 pencil. Since the ancient Egyptians wrote on papyrus and the Chinese made the first modern paper 900 years ago, humans have used paper to record and preserve their lives.

It’s no wonder then that when Brent Sheppard, a South Bend, Ind.-based consultant, approaches executives about buying his paperless office system, many are appalled.

“They say, ‘You want me to throw my paper away? How dare you tell me this?’ ” Sheppard says.

Even environmentalists have largely skirted the issue of corporate paper consumption, instead pushing for forest protection, says Ned Daly, spokesman for the nonprofit, Washington, D.C.-based Resource Conservation Alliance. “Talking about reducing consumption isn’t a way to get money.”

To make matters worse, technology has added to the paper flood, not reduced it.

Instead of passing around professionally published documents or making a few copies, workers now have the power to print and copy willy-nilly. When e-mail is introduced in an office, printing skyrockets 40%, according to Hewlett-Packard Co.

Eventually, electronic information will dominate. While 90% of the information on the office desk was paper-based in 1994, it’ll be 50% paper-based by 2004, according to Xplor International, a document research organization based in Torrance.

Yet because the overall volume of information is growing so rapidly, the amount of paper at our fingertips is still burgeoning. The number of pages consumed in U.S. offices is going up 6% each year and is expected to hit 1.54 trillion by 2000, according to the Norwell, Mass.-based market research firm CAP Ventures.

Some companies are drawing the line, trying to replace paper with electronic methods of communication.

Since Great Lakes Insurance Associates invested a year and $100,000 into going paperless, insurance agents from six states have made pilgrimages to the small Erie, Pa., agency to see how it’s done.

The files of Great Lakes’ 10,000 clients are now computerized, allowing employees to stop trekking to file cabinets to handle calls. Each customer service staffer now handles $2 million in client business annually, double the amount prior to the conversion.

Interestingly, most companies barely mention the environment when talking about going paper free. An exception is BankAmerica, whose 5-year-old campaign has been driven by such concerns.

Nor are companies motivated by cost savings. Although Owens Corning has saved $50,000 in paper and $900,000 in mailing costs at its headquarters in the last year, leaders are far more interested in the productivity gains they think they’ll make by going electronic.

Radcliff puts it simply. “We want to rethink how we work.”

Still, he admits that paper is going to be around for a long time. “We selected our language with care. We didn’t say we’d be ‘paperless,’ ” he says slowly. “We said ‘paper-free’--unencumbered by paper.”