The 5 Rules of Paper Shredding: A Guide

Paper shredding has become an essential measure to protect your business from data breaches, security infiltration and identity theft. You may think it’s all gone digital, but dumpster diving performed by unscrupulous individuals is all the rage nowadays. It’s time to be careful.

Identity theft rates are at all-time highs. When businesses handle credit card receipts, employee contracts and corporate presentations on a day-to-day basis, you need to shield your affairs.One of the best ways to ensure that you’re safeguarded from prying eyes and nefarious culprits is to embrace paper shredding, either using technology or hiring a professional service to do it.No one will ever argue the fact that it won’t be easy, especially considering that your enterprise has likely accumulated endless boxes of documents, pages and papers. Yes, we know it’s a lot.

Here are five things your business needs to remember about paper shredding:

1. Use Criss-Cross Shredding Machines

Believe it or not, criminals are dedicated to their craft. This means that even though you have bags and bags of shredded paper, they will take the time to disseminate each line of paper.

That said, it is crucial to acquire criss-cross shredding machines rather than horizontal ones. It is a lot harder to read paper that has been shred in a criss-cross way – at the same time, it’s easier to gather all of the information from horizontal or vertical paper.

2. Organize Your Shredding Priorities

Not all of your shredding needs are created equal. Some require a higher priority than others.

Once you initiate your shredding endeavours, you will need to determine what will be shred immediately and what will be destroyed over a period of time. Essentially, things like five-year-old credit card receipts, decade-old tax records and 15-year-old employment contracts should be shred first. Over time, you can shred memos, internal documents and old presentations.

3. Take a Look at Your Hard Drives

Document destruction doesn’t just involve paper. In fact, you could also shred your archaic hard drives that you never use anymore. If you are upgrading your computer infrastructure then now would be an opportune time to shred the hard drives with all of your sensitive documents.

You need to remember, however, to first transfer the files, wipe the hard drive and then shred.

4. Be Sure to Clean the Shredder’s Blades

After you performed a heavy-duty shredding job, you need to take the time to clean the shredder’s blades. Should you refrain from performing this task then you risk wearing down the efficacy of the shredder and its blades. You don’t want this to happen at all.

A simple bout of maintenance will ensure that your paper shredder will have a longer life span.

5. Hire a Professional Shredding Service

You have two rooms dedicated to boxes and filing cabinets filled with paper, documents and pages. You also have some more boxes at the other end of the primary workspace. You may even have some boxes of files underneath the break room sink. That’s a lot of paper to destroy.

Indeed, this can be overwhelming, which means that perhaps you may need to hire a professional shredding service. These companies have the technology, resources and manpower to shred all of your paper with ease. They also know what recycling plant to bring it to upon completion. You can’t go wrong with a shredding company.

Here is a question: what does your company’s trash say about your corporate reputation? It suggests that you’re unorganized, your operations are in disarray and you don’t know how to maintain a proper office space. Yes, your ocean of paper says a lot about you and your firm.

You can give your reputation a shot in the arm by undergoing shredding, whether by yourself with a machine or by tapping the services of professional shredders. You won’t be sorry.