When you work in a small office, there are compromises. Probably the most annoying is a loud shredder. There is no separate shredding room of course, that would be a luxury. Instead the paper shredder is most likely somewhere in between the water cooler and the coffee station. This means that someone will inevitably start shredding while you are on the phone with a client, leading to flailing arms and the mouthed words, “turn that thing off!”  Or someone starts shredding while you are having a meeting, leading to a collective sigh and someone volunteering to tell the shredding perpetrator, as tactfully as possible, “not right now.”

Eventually someone will get fed up, whether it’s the boss and CEO (who has the little office next to the bathroom) or the admin or can’t get anything done while that obnoxious shredder rattles on all day and decides to take administrative action. This means putting up a laminated sign outlining rules of shredding conduct. Making statements like:

Please determine if a meeting is in session before shredding, or have the courtesy to not shred when others are on the phone.

But signs don’t solve the problem, and when records rooms need to be purged after tax time and a piles of paper starts taking up space around the shredder to the point where you have bob and weave around canceled FTP proposal forms just to get your lunch out of the mini fridge.  Now the complaint will be. “Who is supposed to be shredding all this?”

The poor intern of course will shrug and point to the laminated sign, indicated that meetings and phone calls have interrupted the unwanted but critical shredding process.
A Quieter Shredder Solution.

Select a shredder with quiet performance features, specifically designed for the small office.

Here are some options:

The 79CI Cross Cut Shredder not only features whisper quiet SilentSense to return peace and quiet to your tiny workplace, it also features 100% jam proof shredding.

Also consider the 90S Strip Cut Paper Shredder. This robust small office shredder, also with quiet performance, destroys documents for up to 25 minutes before requiring a cool down.

For higher security needs, the 99MS micro-cut paper shredder shreds paper 5x smaller than cross cut shredders, and does so quietly.