Manager's obsessive cost-cutting initiatives cost the company more money when double-sided printing policy causes problems with important client: 'All printing must be double-sided—no exceptions'

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Brad Dickson • Managing Editor
Oct 21, 2024 12:00 PM EDT

A double-edged sword cuts both ways, and you could probably get a paper cut from a double-sided print job, too. Cutting costs might seem like a good idea, but really, you're probably just going to slice right through other important things like customer satisfaction and, by extension, your company's profit. After all, as the old saying goes…You gotta spend money to make money.

Overly inflexible policies are almost certainly a double-edged sword. When you demand rigid adherence to rules, leaving no room for people to make necessary and practical adjustments, you're going to end up with results that you might not have anticipated, with your initiatives backfiring in unexpected ways.

That's what happened when this manager, who was obsessed with cutting costs, insisted on enforcing a strict double-sided printing policy with no room for exception, even with important documents for an important client that simply could not be printed double-sided. The rush print job and priority shipping needed to properly print the documents afterward quickly ate through any possible savings that the policy would have created. While the manager in this story might have learned his lesson, far too many fail to do so.

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    Cheezburger Image 10418450944
    via Getty Images For Unsplash+
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    The Double-Sided Policy Disaster M I work in a small office, and like a lot of companies, we've got that one manager who's obsessed with cutting costs-ours is "Mark." Mark wasn't a bad guy, but he had this laser focus on reducing expenses, no matter how small. One of his biggest obsessions was paper. He was convinced we were blowing our budget on printing, so he implemented a new policy: Everything had to be double-sided.
    via firakti
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    It wasn't a suggestion. It was a hard rule. Mark sent an email to everyone in the office, cc'ing HR to make it official: "From this point forward, all printing must be double-sided-no exceptions. If we catch unnecessary single- sided printing, there will be consequences."
    via firakti
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    Most of us didn't see it as a big deal for internal documents. But there were times it was a problem. We regularly worked with contracts, legal forms, and client documents-things that, for whatever reason, often had to be single-sided. A few of us raised concerns about this with Mark, but his response was always the same: "Rules are rules. Double- sided saves us money. Stick to the policy." Now, here's where the compliance comes in.
    via firakti
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    A couple of weeks later, we got a massive contract from one of our biggest clients-let's call them GreenTech. The deal was huge, easily one of the biggest projects we'd handled all year, and it came with a lot of paperwork. The instructions from GreenTech were crystal clear: the contract had to be printed single-sided to meet their legal department's standards.
    via firakti
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    I figured this might be one of those rare cases where Mark would make an exception. So, I went to him, explained the situation, and showed him the client's instructions. Mark just shrugged and said, "Company policy is company policy. We're not wasting paper. Double-sided."
    via firakti
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    At this point, I knew where this was headed, but fine. I followed the rules. I printed the entire 80- page contract double-sided and sent it off to the client. A couple of days later, we get an email from GreenTech. They weren't pleased. In fact, they were asking us to reprint the whole thing-single- sided this time-or they'd reconsider doing business with us.
    via firakti
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    When I showed the email to Mark, his face turned red. He had no choice but to backtrack and scramble to fix the mess. We ended up having to reprint the entire contract correctly and rush ship it to GreenTech overnight, which ended up costing us more in fees than the printing savings Mark had been so focused on.
    via firakti
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    The best part? After that fiasco, Mark quietly rolled back the "no exceptions" rule for double-sided printing, and we were all allowed to use our judgment on a case- by-case basis. Funny how a little compliance with bad policies can show why they don't work in practice.
    via firakti
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    PN_Guin "No exceptions" rules rarely work in real life.
    via firakti
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    RSGK And sans-serif fonts only! Those serifs cost ink!
    via firakti
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    slackerassftw In some ways I'm surprised they let you reprint the document rather than cancel. I've seen the single sided requirement quite a bit for legal documents and have seen contracts lost for not doing it. I'm sure Mark almost lost his job over it.
    via firakti
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    3amGreenCoffee Similar theme, but no malicious compliance: My job involves reviewing a certain type of legal file in client offices. When I arrived at one such office, the manager was very proud of their new paperless document storage. She explained that six months. earlier they had contracted
    via firakti
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    with an outside company to scan their paper files and provide secure digital access to them in PDF. She sat me down in front of one of their computers and showed it off. So I was sitting there trying to verify signatures on documents as part of my review, when I realized that most of these documents were missing the even- numbered pages. I call her in
    via firakti
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    and say, "Got a question for you. Are all your documents printed double-sided?" "Oh of course!" she said. "I instituted that policy to save money on paper." "Well were you aware that your scanning company is only scanning your files simplex?" She went pale. "Uh, no, I didn't know that."
    via firakti
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    "Yep, all these documents I'm reviewing are missing all the even-numbered pages, so I'm not able to see everything I need. Some of the signature pages are missing on these contracts." But it got worse. Some sections of the PDFs were complete gibberish that had nothing to do with the files in which they were included. "What is this?" I asked, pointing to some copy that was marked through with lines and scribbled on.
    via firakti
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    She went even whiter. "Oh my god," she said. "If people do print single-sided, they have to put those pages in a box next to the copier. Then we reuse that paper to print on the other side." In other words, in the situations where they had printed single-sided, the scanning company had scanned the wrong side of each page.
    via firakti
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    "Okay, then I'm going to need your physical files to be able to verify the signatures on these documents," I said. She went translucent and looked like she was about to be sick. "We don't have the physical files. The scanning company shreds them when they're done."
    via firakti
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    "Well now that's a problem," I said. And it was a big one. They had not only destroyed pages and pages of the last six months of their work, but the scan-and-shred company had also started digitally archiving their file storage warehouse. They were up into thousands of files that had been scanned improperly and destroyed.
    via firakti
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    I wasn't involved in the follow up and don't know what the actual fallout from that was, but I think I watched a woman's career go through the shredder that day as well.
    via firakti

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