Finding the Money for Today’s Higher Wages (Hint: It’s in Your Filing Cabinets)

The Great Resignation has sent wages climbing further and faster than we’ve seen in decades – up 5.7% in just one year. There are more job openings than there are unemployed people to fill the jobs. Help Wanted signs are everywhere. Employers’ budgets were based on old employment forecasts; now they are scrambling to find the funds for the higher salaries the marketplace demands. Profits are bracing for a hit.

But there’s a way to cover the higher salaries without increasing your budget. It involves reducing your real estate footprint – and the costs associated with it – in one simple way: Get rid of those acres of file cabinets and archived document boxes.

Every business holds on to more paper than it really needs. However, there are intangible productivity costs associated with paper, according to PriceWaterhouse:

• 8 hours– the amount of time an employee spends managing paper documents each week
• $122– the cost of finding a single lost document
• 750– the number of lost paper documents per year, per mid-size business

Lost documents alone cost the average business a whopping $91,500 annually.

But beyond the productivity costs, there are the very tangible costs of the real estate needed to file all that unnecessary paper. A standard filing cabinet takes up 9 square feet of space. That single filing cabinet translates to $500 per year in rent, at the current rate of $54 to $60 per square foot in Washington, D.C.

Document conversion offers a solution. When you digitize all those stored documents, you first go through a triage process that identifies the documents that you absolutely must preserve as paper. The digitization (scanning) process then creates a document database of all your documents, secure and searchable.

To complete the process, all the less-the-necessary documents are shredded securely, in compliance with any applicable regulations. Your document storage needs are suddenly reduced. Your storage area goes from several hundred square feet down to the size of a single external hard drive.

And just like that, your budget can be re-aligned, covering the HR shortfall with the real estate savings.

Of course, there are other factors to consider, like the terms of your current lease, or a move to a hybrid work model (which also benefits from digitization, as we have ). But no matter your circumstances, digitization will create appealing cost savings which could very possibly balance your budget.