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I used my office printer to print 4 colored pictures for my sister's school project. The office printer is of much higher quality so I thought why not. At first, I didn't think much of it, but I'm wondering if this is a no-no in the workplace?
Thank you.
If you work for me you do not use company equipment for your own personal use.
Go to Walgreens on your lunch or after work, go to CVS on your lunch or after work, go to your own home and use your own equipment.
Why should I pay for your Sister's school project? She isn't my Sister and I don't pay you to use my company time and equipment for yourself or your family.
Seriously? That's hardly the same thing. Offices print 1000s of pages a day of useless junk. You really think that 4 pages makes a difference?
Considering the pathetic ways that companies are squeezing employees these days, I think it's perfectly fair to use office supplies for personal use as long as you're not doing so excessively.
I agree, i'll routinely get several copies of work-related documents that I've already received. god forbid I print something out that I need once in a blue moon because my printer doesn't work or I can't find the time to print it out at home because I am working 3 consecutive 14 hours shifts in a row.
if the boss gets their period over me printing out a couple of pages i'll throw them a nickel per page ffs.
as long as you're not constantly printing non-work related stuff, then I don't see the big deal. as for the butthurt responses about "stealing" from the company, you people fer real? get over yourselves. I bet you waste your company's resources in other ways and don't even know it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by CSD610
If you work for me you do not use company equipment for your own personal use.
Go to Walgreens on your lunch or after work, go to CVS on your lunch or after work, go to your own home and use your own equipment.
Why should I pay for your Sister's school project? She isn't my Sister and I don't pay you to use my company time and equipment for yourself or your family.
you seem like such a joy to work for. do you charge your employees every time they need to take a dump in your company toilet too?
If you work for me you do not use company equipment for your own personal use.
Go to Walgreens on your lunch or after work, go to CVS on your lunch or after work, go to your own home and use your own equipment.
Why should I pay for your Sister's school project? She isn't my Sister and I don't pay you to use my company time and equipment for yourself or your family.
Because that small token will lead to happier employees, which should help your company. If a company is too strict, the employees are more likely to get fed up and leave, and high turnover is a lot more costly than a few pieces of paper and some ink.
It's different for small and big companies though. If you're talking about a very small firm, printer costs might be on par with what people pay at home. For a large company, paper and ink is so much cheaper that it's not even worth worrying about. At my company (an enormous company with 250,000+ employees), people waste so much paper on unnecessary work-related print jobs (printing out multiple drafts of 100 page monthly decks, etc) that it's not worth worrying about someone that prints out their boarding pass every now and then. Even if you can add up the cost of every single personal printout across the company, it would barely be a rounding error in their year-end financials.
It depends on the company, and technology. My old company had a pretty open policy, 100 pages/month b&w, 10 pages color was fine, more then that required you to ask (and near as I can tell was always approved)
Current workplace has no policy, but I suspect if you abused it too much someone would talk to you.
It's without a doubt inconsiderate of an employee to print out, say, a sister's school project on the company's printer. I can understand why the owners would be tiffed about that.
However, if you have an owner who's getting riled up over just a couple pieces of paper that an employee prints here and there, while they're certainly entitled to get riled up about it, I definitely wouldn't want to work for that company.
I suppose they also charge (or get highly upset) when guests want to use their bathrooms as well, because that extra flush is going to lead to a nominal increase in their water bill?
Frankly, if I printed out a simple list or page or two on my way out the door I wouldn't expect my employer to get bent out of shape about it.
Same way that if I had to say an extra 10 minutes I wouldn't be a butt head about it either.
Kinda depends on the work type and so forth.
P.S. I think we can do without the hyperbole like comparing 4 sheets of paper printed off = 50 cents vs. driving around a company car with a monetary impact being vastly higher. Just like the employee shouldn't be bent out of shape for working 2 minutes extra @10dollars an hour = 33 cents of "lost wages".
I agree, i'll routinely get several copies of work-related documents that I've already received. god forbid I print something out that I need once in a blue moon because my printer doesn't work or I can't find the time to print it out at home because I am working 3 consecutive 14 hours shifts in a row.
if the boss gets their period over me printing out a couple of pages i'll throw them a nickel per page ffs.
as long as you're not constantly printing non-work related stuff, then I don't see the big deal. as for the butthurt responses about "stealing" from the company, you people fer real? get over yourselves. I bet you waste your company's resources in other ways and don't even know it.
you seem like such a joy to work for.do you charge your employees every time they need to take a dump in your company toilet too?
At my employer, print jobs go through a print server before they go to the printer, and all kinds of details about that print job are retained for budget purposes. (Users can print to any printer on the network, but the costs fir the printing are sent to their department, rather than the department where the printer is located.) If HR wanted to catch someone using the printer for personal jobs, it would be trivially easy for the people who administer that server to monitor any single user's usage, even to the point of keeping a copy of the document that was printed.
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