Personal printing at work is becoming a growing concern for business owners, and with good reason. There are a number of arguments as to why personal printing is bad for business.
When employees do their own personal printing at work, it racks up unnecessary costs – such as money spent on paper, on toner, and on maintenance due to the machines running more frequently than they need to.
If you’re an employee yourself, you may not think printing the occasional event ticket or boarding pass is a big deal. However, if there’s a whole office of people printing the occasional personal item, it adds up over time.
As a manager or employer reading this, you are probably looking for the most effective way to enforce a personal printing policy at work. In this article I will give you a few options to consider, and then you can decide which is best for your specific business.
Controlling Personal Printing at Work
First, it’s important to make employees aware that you have a policy against personal printing. The policy should be enforced across the board, because it wouldn’t be fair if some employees are allowed to do their own personal printing and not others. Set a standard policy for everyone.
Now let’s talk about enforcing that policy. Personal printing at work can get out of hand when you don’t know who is doing it, or how many personal prints they’re outputting each month. The easiest way to control that is with a code.
Commercial machines can be locked with a code, which means employees have to input a unique 3 or 4 digit number before the copier will function. This can be set up on either the machine itself, or on office computers.
With employees having to input a unique code before being able to print, 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 making personal prints, and then deal with it accordingly.
However you choose to deal with it is up to you, which could differ compared to the volume of personal prints being output by a single individual.
Another option is to set up a reimbursement policy. This would involve letting employees do as much personal printing as they want, on the basis they reimburse the company for it.
You could have employees reimburse the company by paying per print. Another option would be keeping a tab, so to speak, and have them pay for all personal prints at the end of the month. Again, the best way to keep track of employees’ personal prints is to implement a code system as mentioned above.
Personal Printing at Work: Conclusion
Personal printing is a growing concern that can be easily controlled with a code. Every commercial machine we sell at Dean Office Solutions has the ability to be locked with a such a code.
Whether you’re looking to buy, lease, or rent a new copier machine we’d be happy to walk you through the process of implementing an access code. Please contact me for more information.