Pulp Addiction

Totally ridding your office of paper is a wise and noble goal--but don't expect it to go off smoothly

One morning last June, Dan Caulfield stormed through the headquarters of Hire Quality Inc., his job-placement firm in Chicago, with a large metal waste barrel in tow. Without missing a beat, he snatched yellow stickies from monitors, crumpled up spreadsheets, and rummaged through drawers until he had gathered every shred of paper he could find. Some employees laughed at first, amused by the shenanigans. But the laughing abruptly ended when Caulfield dragged the barrel out to the fire escape. Before an aghast crowd huddled on the narrow metal stairwell, he doused the trash heap with lighter fluid and set it ablaze. For some, a month's worth of work went up in smoke. Others were so desperate to save precious documents that they tried to pull them from the consuming flames.

Caulfield, a former lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps, concedes that this was an unorthodox management technique. But he also believes it was the only way to rid his small business of the scourge of paper. When you're in a field that's as driven by speed and high volume as his, he says, paper is nothing but trouble. "I had to do something dramatic," says Caulfield, "or people would have gone on using paper forever."

For years, futurists have extolled the virtues of the paperless office, touting an impressive array of benefits, from improved worker efficiency to forest preservation. With paper abolished, they say, employees will no longer waste hours searching through seemingly endless rows of file cabinets; menial jobs will be eliminated; and the cost of financial transactions will be slashed as companies no longer mail their bills but send, receive, and pay them by wire.

The only trouble is, the old medium has had more staying power than the pundits imagined. For most of us, jotting down phone numbers and scribbling notes in the margins of reports is a natural part of the way we work. And in many ways, paper is everything that the electronic medium is not: familiar, intuitive, and universal. Simply put, we're hooked on paper, and tearing it away from workers is like taking heroin away from an addict.

"There are important power and control issues at stake," explains Jeanette Blomberg, an anthropologist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, in California, who studies work practices. Blomberg says that our proclivity for pulp goes far beyond the fact that paper is easy to use and portable--although both are important. She notes that we have a profound need to create printed documents because they substantiate our work efforts and make us feel we have control over what we produce. "People like to hand physical documents to their superiors or clients so that they can receive an instant reaction--positive or negative," says Blomberg.

It's a sentiment Caulfield's employees couldn't agree with more. Since June 1994, when he launched Hire Quality, a recruitment firm for honorably discharged military personnel, Caulfield has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless hours into building high-tech systems designed to free his 25 full-time and 20 part-time employees from the printed page. The process has been orderly enough--except for one major glitch: his employees haven't been particularly eager to make the break. "No matter what I've said or done, people seem to fall back on using paper," sighs Caulfield.

Without question, the paper-burning incident was one of the most trying at the fledgling company. "People were pissed," says Caulfield. One employee even resigned. Still, the antics had a significant payoff: Now, nine months later, desks are spotless, everyone accepts voice mail and databases, and monitors are no longer framed by yellow Post-It notes. In a symbolic gesture of acquiescence, one worker transformed his double-decker paper tray into a water pan for a thriving fern. "We certainly haven't totally eliminated paper--I'm not sure that we ever will," admits Caulfield, "but we are closer than we were last year."

Caulfield contends that if he'd launched his company using conventional paper-based methods, he probably wouldn't have lasted even a few short months because he'd quickly have been bogged down in the time-consuming and tedious tasks of processing, faxing, and searching for paper résumés (it could take up to 15 minutes to locate a candidate's paper file). Unlike many other placement firms that aim to supply the perfect person for every available position, Hire Quality provides clients with a flood of candidates who match the skill set. That's because the job slots the company fills primarily--blue-collar and service-technician slots--don't need the same degree of screening that, say, executive or management positions require. In fact, it's not uncommon for Hire Quality to send out at least 3,000 candidates' résumés in a month. "I knew that I could do everything I needed to do using computers," says Caulfield. "Once I started automating, I began to see that the possibilities were endless."

For Caulfield, computers and careers have always gone hand-in-hand. He stumbled upon the job-recruitment industry when he was chosen, in December 1993, to launch one of the military's first transition and separation centers, at Twenty-nine Palms, a military base in the Mojave Desert. The centers were set up to examine the Armed Forces' employment record for discharged personnel and to help remedy the situation by editing résumés, honing candidates' interviewing skills, and identifying suitable civilian jobs. No easy task. But Caulfield, who thrives on a challenge, placed more than 400 people in the first six months of the center's existence.

Energized by his success and convinced that he had tapped a hidden source of labor, Caulfield wanted to continue his work in the private sector. So when he was honorably discharged six months later, at age 27, he headed for Chicago, where he initially set up shop in a rented apartment. After having watched résumés quickly stack up at Twenty-nine Palms, he knew that without some sort of electronic system from the start, converting paper files to bits and bytes in the future would be prohibitive. Inspired, he ventured out to his local Best Buy and purchased $4,500 worth of high-tech equipment, including a Pentium computer, a modem, a fax machine, and a printer.