As an employer, you know it happens. Employees who spend most of their day at work likely do personal printing at the office. In their defense, when a person spends most of their day at a place that has what they need for handling important personal business, it just seems convenient to handle it—at the office. But as a manager, how much is it costing to have personal printing done on the office copier? Well, it depends on how many people are doing it and how much they’re printing. And you probably have no idea.
The bottom line is personal printing at the office is a problem and does cost the company money. Paper spent for work-related issues is being used, not to mention toner. The more a copier is used, the more maintenance is needed, which can be expensive.
If personal printing at the office is a problem, this post will offer two solutions to help eliminate personal printing at the office.
Establish a Policy
The first thing you want to do is ensure your team is aware of the no personal printing policy. That can be done by putting the policy in written form and making sure it’s visible in multiple places. It should be viewable from the website, each team member should have a copy, and it should be in close proximity to the printers so there’s no excuse to not know about it.
To take it even further, the policy could contain consequences for doing personal printing at the office. That policy should apply to everyone, with no exceptions.
Now, how can you enforce the policy? Personal printing at the office can get out of hand when you don’t know who is doing it. The easiest way to control that is with a code.
Enforce the Policy
With managed print services, businesses now can know which employees are printing to which devices and what they are printing. By assigning a unique print code to each team member, you will always know what everyone is printing. Printers are locked until a code is entered, meaning they won’t be able to print without using their personal code.
With employees having to enter a unique code, you can keep a record of who is printing what. You can then audit this data at the end of each month to see who is doing personal printing at the office and then deal with it accordingly.
One way to deal with it is to enforce the repercussions outlined in the company policy. Another way of dealing with it is to determine how much personal spending has been done at the end of the month and have the guilty party(s) reimburse the company accordingly. Of course, this option will need to be included in the written policy. That way, the employee would already be aware of the reimbursement clause. The specifics of that clause would need to be known in advance by all employees.
Conclusion
At any rate, having such policies in place would cause a team member to think twice before doing personal printing at the office. Either way, personal printing at the office would no longer be a problem because personal printing would either seize or decrease immensely.
If you’re interested to learn more about managed printing services, contact us, and we’d be happy to discuss further.