Dive Brief:

• Between office output and the stuff we all receive in the mail ( i.e. utility bills, invoices and bank statements), America prints out or photocopies around 1.6 trillion pieces of paper annually. If you stacked all that paper up, it would reach nearly halfway to the moon, according to the Wall Street Journal.
• Bottom line, paper still rules. That's why it makes sense that HP Inc. is acquiring Samsung Electronics Co.’s printing and copying business, the Journal reports. An HP company spokesman told the Journal that HP holds less than 5% of the market for big, high-throughput office copying machines.
• There is a comical side to the paper problem. Predictions of a paperless society have been floating around for years. In 1975, for example, a BusinessWeek article by an analyst at Arthur D. Little Inc. predicted paper would never make it much past 1990. But according to the Journal article, it's going to take at least a few more decades to get there.

Dive Insight

When it comes to paper piling up, HR has made strides over the past few decades with the rise of online benefits enrollment, employee and manager self-service, cloud-based HR core systems, e-learning and other technology-based processes. That's not even scratching the surface of the future of tech in the HR industry.  Yet, it's a good bet that there are many employers still using reams of paper for things like employee policy handbooks and other employee-facing programs, mainly in the benefits area.

There is one area within HR that is helping to keep the paper piles to a minimum, and that's electronic-signatures. With e-signatures, critical HR documents can remain entirely digital because employee signatures are at the heart of why paper just never went away. HR leaders using e-signatures should be careful, however, because their usage could potentially have an impact on the long-term validity of HR documents.