Reasons Your Employees Avoid the Office Shredder

If your office shredder had an offensive odor, was ugly, or tripped employees as they walked by, it would be understandable that your employees would choose to avoid it. But these are likely not the reasons your staff haven’t been using the shredder.

Your employees may be avoiding the shredding machine for one reason, a combination of several, or a slowly-escalating cycle of problems without solutions.

Do any of the shredding problems below seem familiar?

The Dreaded Shredding Cycle

Shredding Problem #1: The noise! The constant roaring and grinding of an office paper shredder can fray the nerves. No one wants it near them and everyone tries to find the least-offensive time to shred. Don’t shred when someone is on the phone. Don’t shred during a break or lunch. Don’t shred anytime someone is trying to concentrate on their work. So what do you do?

Shredding Solution #1: You put the shredding machine in a closet in an isolated part of the office where the sound is muffled. This is perfect because no one can hear the shredder when it is running. If it is ever running, that is. Because now you have a new shredding problem.

Shredding Problem #2: Now that the shredder is in out of the way in a closet to avoid the noise, your staff are finding it too inconvenient and time consuming to visit the shredder every time they need secure documents shredded. Do you make a trip to the shredding closet each time you need to dispose of a sensitive document? Do you add a trip to the shredder onto your bathroom break or a visit to a colleague’s desk? What do to?

Shredding Solution #2: Instead of making so many trips to the shredder, employees wait until they have a stack before they make the trip to the shredder. Some wait until the end of the day just before leaving for home. But this solution has now become the source of yet another shredding problem.

Shredding Problem #3: You realize that letting papers stack up defeats the very purpose of shredding them in the first place because you are leaving private sensitive information vulnerable to being lost, stolen, or being tossed in the trash or recycling. You have also noticed that because employees like to wait until day’s end to shred their stack of papers, there’s often a line for the shredder. Because the shredder is slow and only capable of shredding 3-4 pages at once, employees get frustrated and take their stack back to their desk to sit until tomorrow. After all, the traffic is building and they want to get home!

Those that are willing to deal with the finicky shredder are rewarded with a shredder that stops working because it has overheated, jammed, or completely broken down. It turns out that all the time spent on DIY shredding is a terrible waste of valuable employee time. Since document destruction isn’t in anyone’s job description, no one is solely responsible for protecting the data on those documents.

Shredding Solution #3: After some research, you decide that your shredding should be outsourced to the experts if you are going to comply with data protection laws, protect your clients’ and employees’ information, and protect your brand and company from government fines and legal action. You also find out that you can request a Certificate of Destruction to prove your compliance, and that when you work with an environmentally-friendly shredding company, they recycle 100 percent of the paper they shred. Not only that, but their industrial shredding equipment can shred massive quantities of paper all at once. You don’t even have to remove staples and paperclips!

What a great way to solve—and prevent—a lot of problems at once!

Apex Shredding provides NAID AAA Certified shredding services in Northern Colorado. We provide scheduled mobile shredding service and one-time purge shredding service right at your door. To keep your discarded documents safe between visits, we provide locked shredding collection containers that take the hassle and risk right out of paper shredding. For more information or to book service, simply give us a call at 907-532-5007 or complete the form on this page. Our friendly shredding experts are standing by!