04-22-2020
Work From Home: Lessons Toward Achieving a Paperless Office
In celebration of Earth Week 2020, FXCollaborative Principal and Chief Technology Officer Alexandra Pollock is sharing research about our office's paper usage, our efforts to reduce waste, and the silver lining to our current work from home scenario.
A few months ago, our Digital Practice group had a conversation with our internal sustainability workgroup Team Green about how we could help reduce the amount of paper used in our office. Using data generated from our print logs, we created a series of charts that depict how much paper we were using in the office, sorted by project. On our standard office printers alone (excluding the marketing department), we printed 16,818 square feet of paper in December 2019.
As a result of FXCollaborative's current work from home (WFH) status, in the month of April 2020, this number will be zero.
Forced to be almost 100% paperless this past month has had its challenges, but it also has the benefit of helping us build our digital collaboration skills as an office. Teams have increased the use of digital collaboration tools to help their daily workflows, including shared digital notebooks for meeting notes, tasks, and project information; cloud-based PDF sessions for collaborative markup sets; and digital pin-up boards that allow teams to fluidly share sketches and ideas. Use of these collaboration tools is in addition to conferencing and communication technologies, enabling our teams to stay connected and creative.
FXCollaborative is embracing these technologies to continue designing, documenting, and interfacing with our clients and teams to keep our projects on track. These digital tools have the advantage of being accessible from anywhere by all team members, allowing them to simultaneously participate and contribute, while also saving paper.
Work from home has helped us be more creative with how we work with drawing sets and specifications. As architects and designers, we reference many different documents during the design and construction process, especially for submittal reviews, which traditionally resulted in stacks of printed drawings and documents laid out across a large table. Without the same level of access to printers in our WFH spaces, each of us has been finding new and creative ways to access the information we need without paper. For example, pictured below is how one of our architects set up her at-home workspace for reviews, where she has access to drawings, specifications, email, and more, with minimal usage of paper.
These tools and techniques have not only allowed us to keep our collaborative design process going during social distancing, but have also given us new insight into how we can design without relying so much on printing. While traditional mediums like paper will continue to have a role in our process, the new methods and workflows we are developing now can help us all be more thoughtful of our paper use moving forward.
A few months ago, our Digital Practice group had a conversation with our internal sustainability workgroup Team Green about how we could help reduce the amount of paper used in our office. Using data generated from our print logs, we created a series of charts that depict how much paper we were using in the office, sorted by project. On our standard office printers alone (excluding the marketing department), we printed 16,818 square feet of paper in December 2019.
As a result of FXCollaborative's current work from home (WFH) status, in the month of April 2020, this number will be zero.
Forced to be almost 100% paperless this past month has had its challenges, but it also has the benefit of helping us build our digital collaboration skills as an office. Teams have increased the use of digital collaboration tools to help their daily workflows, including shared digital notebooks for meeting notes, tasks, and project information; cloud-based PDF sessions for collaborative markup sets; and digital pin-up boards that allow teams to fluidly share sketches and ideas. Use of these collaboration tools is in addition to conferencing and communication technologies, enabling our teams to stay connected and creative.
FXCollaborative is embracing these technologies to continue designing, documenting, and interfacing with our clients and teams to keep our projects on track. These digital tools have the advantage of being accessible from anywhere by all team members, allowing them to simultaneously participate and contribute, while also saving paper.
Work from home has helped us be more creative with how we work with drawing sets and specifications. As architects and designers, we reference many different documents during the design and construction process, especially for submittal reviews, which traditionally resulted in stacks of printed drawings and documents laid out across a large table. Without the same level of access to printers in our WFH spaces, each of us has been finding new and creative ways to access the information we need without paper. For example, pictured below is how one of our architects set up her at-home workspace for reviews, where she has access to drawings, specifications, email, and more, with minimal usage of paper.
These tools and techniques have not only allowed us to keep our collaborative design process going during social distancing, but have also given us new insight into how we can design without relying so much on printing. While traditional mediums like paper will continue to have a role in our process, the new methods and workflows we are developing now can help us all be more thoughtful of our paper use moving forward.
