Making Your Office More Green

I recently read a great blog by Turnstone about making your office more green with the addition of plants(click here to read their blog). I know this topic has been broached before, especially if you're trying to avoid your coworker's colds (geraniums are great!), but there is something about a vase of flowers or a potted English Ivy during a dreary winter which adds a bit a sunshine to your work area. Check out Turnstone's Blog and consider making an addition to your desk or office space!

Click here!

Happy Holidays from B&OI!

Whether you're celebrating your second day of Hannukah, scrambling for your last minute Christmas gifts, or just happy that NBA basketball is starting/NFL playoffs are around the corner/NHL is having a good season or that Mission Impossible comes out next week, Bank & Office Interiors wants to wish you and your family a Happy Holiday Season and a wonderful New Year!

retrieved from http://www.jockpost.com/

So enjoy the festivities and stay warm! Like my father always says..."Be good. But if you can't be good, be safe". i.e. be careful with your travels and your parties!

Best Wishes,
Kendal

Your Worklife Without the Copier?

In March 1960, a curious new machine was first delivered to a customer by a small, little known company; Haloid Xerox.  It was the size of two clothes washers and weighed 650 lbs.  A few of them were prone to setting themselves on fire. It was the Xerox 914; the world’s first commercial electro-photographic copying machine. It revolutionized business and now copiers are a business necessity.

Can you imagine what your work life would be like without the copier? Before it became a “must-have”, clerks and secretaries spent incalculable hours typing out documents on a typewriter with carbon paper to insure a copy could be retained. Make a mistake?  Start over.

Today, the copier is an omnipresent part of the office landscape.

They glory days of the copier are, however, limited. Bank & Office has implemented Document Locator; an electronic document management system.  Eventually, all documents will be cataloged in an electronic library accessible quickly and easily by anyone on all sorts of devices. Together with progressive customers, we can do business using electronic documents exclusively.  Ultimately, we will be able to reduce the number of copiers and printers, saving money, space, electricity, paper and other resources. Filing needs will drop dramatically.  We can spend more of our time helping our customer.

Bank & Office owners’ willingness to invest in Electronic Document Management puts us in a position of leadership amongst businesses in Washington State and our peers in the nation-wide furniture industry. We will be able to offer customers a more cost effective, agile, and environmentally friendly way to do business with us which none of our competitors can match.  It’s a win for the customer, it’s a win for us and it’s LEAN!

~ Danä – Director of IT

How Email is a Bad Thing

When I do new-hire orientations on our Information Technology resources, one of the major topics is e-mail.  The first thing I say is: “E-mail has become the most important means of business communication.  That’s too bad.  Communicating by e-mail is a very stark, raw form compared to sitting down with someone and having a conversation where you have rich visual and verbal elements that drastically enhance the communication. Even a phone call is better than e-mail”. I then go on to discuss policies and best practices to help manage one’s e-mail.

It might seem incongruous that an I.T. Director would discourage the use of e-mail, but this is a thoughtfully deliberated position that touches on issues of community, mentality, perception and success. It is ironic to note that as technology has given us more and more ways of communicating, there is an indisputable and significant decline of physical interaction. Physical interaction is, however, the necessity of community and even more fundamentally, humanity.

Here’s a company which, with more pragmatic motivations, is radically assaulting the morass of e-mail: http://news.yahoo.com/tech-firm-implements-employee-zero-email-policy-165311050.html

Think about this topic and maybe you’ll find yourself having more face to face conversations and reap the benefits thereof.

~ Danä – Director of IT