Shred on Site

The shift to remote working has affected a huge number of businesses in the past year. Complying with the conditions of the pandemic has required a rethink of many office functions with employees not on the premises and data and documents distributed over a much wider area. Shredding has become an essential internal process for organisations in recent years, not just to dispose of paper documents in a more environmentally friendly way but also to ensure standards of security and compliance are met. But how do you handle document shredding for the remote workers in your business?

The shift to the home office

As we have moved to a more remote business model in the past 12 months this has meant that employees are now producing secure business records and documents containing sensitive or confidential data in their own homes. Secure, locked filing cabinets in the office are not accessible and there may be far less space for storage. One of the simplest ways to accommodate a shift to home working that will also ensure that the business remains data privacy compliant is to use a combination of scanning and shredding for all documents that are being generated.

Scanning and shredding for your business

Essential documents are converted into digital copies via scanning and then stored in a secure online database. These might be one-off documents that were generated for meetings or documents that are going to be in use on an ongoing basis - once there is a digital copy they are simple to access. This also works with those documents that you need to keep for compliance purposes or records that need to be retained for a specific period of time - storing those documents digitally provides a clear chain of custody and also ensures that they are kept securely and can be accessed if required by the relevant authorities. Once items have been scanned then the next stage is to arrange shredding for remote workers’ documents.

Shredding for a remote workforce

There are a number of different ways to ensure that documents generated by remote workers are being properly disposed of - the only totally unreliable approach is to ask employees to shred their own documents. Staff may not have a home shredder, may forget or simply not bother. Plus, home shredders don’t achieve the same level of document destruction that a professional shredding service will. One of the simplest ways to ensure that all essential documents are being regularly shredded is with mobile on-site shredding. Working with a shredding partner means that all your staff have to do is bring the documents to the mobile shredding unit when it arrives at their home. The shredding is instant and so is dealt with before the vehicle even leaves the address. There are many benefits to this, including cost, convenience and being able to show that the business is committed to security, as you’ll get a certificate of destruction that shows all the details of when the shredding took place.

Secure document destruction has been one of the major challenges for remote workforces during the pandemic. However, on-site shredding offers a simple way to ensure that standards remain high.

Do you have a team still working from home and looking to make sure that work documents are securely disposed of? Get in touch with Shred-on-Site today to request a quote for all your shredding needs by calling 0800 181 4106 or request an online quote and we will gladly support you..