Summary: Kdan Mobile’s vision of sustainability is digital transformation, the benefits of which include streamlined and supercharged business processes, and we’re focused on moving the corporate world moves toward the paperless office and hybrid work models.
Part of Kdan Mobile’s vision to promote sustainability is to accelerate the digital transformation of our personal and professional lives. Driven by collaborative cloud-based technologies, digital transformation can trigger organizational disruption, with a tremendous positive impact on value creation, strategy, and structure.
Some sustainable benefits of digital transformation that also streamline and supercharge existing business processes include the paperless office and remote work or a hybrid work model. In fact, with the help of these cloud-based collaborative processes, Kdan as an organization has a climate pledge to achieve carbon neutrality by the end of the 2022 calendar year, while reducing business travel by at least 60% this year, with a goal of achieving incremental reductions going forward.
Digital Transformation
Digital strategy has become increasingly intertwined with sustainability. In a recent survey of 400 executives from various industries and regions conducted by Bain and the World Economic Forum, 40% of business leaders said they believe digital technologies are already having a positive impact on their sustainability goals. Digital transformation has stimulated new business models and has caused disruptions in the global markets and industry. The shock waves of digital transformation have crashed upon the shores of traditional businesses while giving rise to more digitally-savvy firms.
Examples are numerous and span the gamut of industries. The hotel industry, for instance, has been radically disrupted by startups such as Booking.com and Airbnb. Spotify brought revolutionary changes to the music industry, while incumbent firms such as IBM and Starbucks have also been radically transformed. These disruptions are enabled by digital technologies such as IoT, big data analytics, cloud computing, mobile technologies, and artificial intelligence.
Most importantly, digital transformation is expected to accelerate the progress of environmental sustainability, with the development of digital technologies delivering improvements to the environment, health, and the entire value chain. Digital technologies have advanced more rapidly than any innovation in our history, transforming societies and reaching around 50 percent of the developing world’s population in only two decades.
The Paperless Office
In the age of sustainability and hybrid work, it’s time to rethink the office. Another upside to digital transformation is that it may finally bring about the paperless office, an integral part of our vision for a sustainable future. Paperless offices as an idea have been floated since personal computers became the basis of the modern workplace. And it might become a reality for some.
With the right technologies, most businesses can come close. Kdan Mobile has designed its professional digital tools to put companies at the forefront of the paperless office movement. Besides offering greater efficiency and convenience to users, our applications work to help decrease your business’s carbon footprint.
One of the greatest benefits of these digital tools is a reduced reliance on paper. While recycling can offset some of the environmental impacts of manufacturing paper products, the long-term results are mixed and can vary by geography. Further, ink and toners contain volatile compounds and non-renewable substances can be damaging to the environment. That’s why reducing paper use altogether by switching to a paperless office is a more long-term solution for sustainability.
The primary environmental benefits tend to fall into three areas—office footprint, resources, and time:
- Space-saving: Paper takes up a lot of space and office footprint – as do filing cabinets and space to store those filing cabinets. Paper also keeps piling up, accumulating more quickly than can be sorted and organized, particularly for industries that have long mandatory retention periods for paperwork like the financial industry. Digitizing files allows you to store all documents either on an on-premises server or in the cloud.
- Resource-saving: Going digital can improve process efficiency, saving energy and resources. Paperless offices can process a much larger volume of paperwork compared to traditional offices in the same amount of time. Digitization also cuts down on paper, printers, ink, postage, office space for files, and employee time to manage paperwork.
- Time-saving: And finally, all that time spent filing, organizing, and searching for paper documents is time that could be steered towards more strategic, less carbon-intensive tasks. Digitized documents are stored in a central repository, which is basically a well-organized digital filing cabinet where all of your documents live. As an online, cloud-based solution, the dataroom software facilitates the secure due diligence process the same way the physical data room does. With modern data capture integration solutions becoming the norm, teams can now centralize and transform data and documents with ease and in a scalable manner.
Remote Work
Today, we exist in a moment where we can redefine both the physical office and our working model to factor in carbon emissions. With companies going back to work, we have a rarefied opportunity to keep more single-occupancy commuter vehicles off the road. In the United States, for instance, carbon emissions from transportation fell by 15% in 2020 due to less pandemic travel.
Some environmental benefits to remote work include:
- Further reducing the amount of paper being used;
- Minimizing the amount of single-use plastics that are commonplace in office settings;
- Cutting down on vehicle emissions;
- Freeing up motivated employees to pursue projects that can help the environment.
However, businesses should strive to strike the right balance to avoid a scenario in which work-from-home offices produce more emissions that aren’t counterbalanced by lower emissions at the public workplace. That means some offices may need to close and others downsized and redesigned to accommodate fewer staff. A paperless office will go some ways towards reducing office size, but a hybrid model will need to actively encourage staff to stay at home a few days out of the week.
That’s why more remote tools like time tracker with screenshots are needed to ensure that collaboration across our hybrid work lives is minimally affected, and even enhanced in certain areas. Virtual collaboration platforms such as Zoom video conferencing, G Suite, and Trello have already started us on this path, while Kdan’s suite of tools such as Document 365, DottedSign, and Creativity 365 to take virtual collaboration even further—all without the need to be in the same physical space. We’re also starting to look into how the “work metaverse” can further enhance remote collaboration through 2D and 3D avatars in virtual worlds.
To learn more about how our solutions can accelerate the digital transformation of your business and promote sustainability, please visit Kdan Mobile’s E-Sign & Digital Transformation solutions center.