You can be able to tell how safe an office is by the manner in which documents are stored. If you store any kind of documents within your business premises, then you are sitting on a potentially volatile situation. There are chances of an emerging fire as an environment that has paper has enough fuel to propagate a fire. The fact that you have paper documents stored means that they are important to you and hence the need to keep them intact.
1. This is the reason why many office buildings have fire safety measures like sprinkler systems and strategically placed fire extinguishers. Many offices have a valid potential of a fire during normal operation. Kitchen appliances, electrical outlets and friction caused by cutting machines are all potential causes of an office fire. Fire safety kits come in handy when containing a fire before it spreads to other parts or becomes uncontainable. While fire extinguishers are operated manually, the overhead sprinklers are triggered by rising room temperatures or smoke detection.
2. Another common producer of heat in a building block is IT equipment even when some are locked in a room and others have self regulating fans. A lot of money is invested in such systems because damaged documents especially the paper ones are not easy to recover and it is therefore better backed up in other means like electronically. The server is fanned all the time with a stand-alone air conditioning system and temperatures inside a server room could be as low as 8 degrees centigrade to achieve required chilling.
3. With so many business functions to perform, outsourcing of paperwork management has become commonplace in large organizations. If you are keen on saving office space and you are not interested in employing someone to specifically be in charge of piles of paper, then outsourcing is right for you. Apart from savings on staffing costs as well as improving the safety of an office, getting a third party company to manage files for you ensures that security and traceability of the needed paper work is simplified.
4. There are guidelines for the storage of paper because piles of paper have weight and if stored in a room the weight factor has to be considered. When storing paper, there is the need to do it in a way that does not cause harm to other rooms within a building. Consider how much you would need to spend in renovations should the weight of the paper cause the floor to either crack or cave in.