Studies show that clean work environments make employees more productive. Without the distraction of clutter, your employees are better able to focus on their work. Productive employees are better able to meet the needs of your customers and ensure that your customers have the best possible experience. Not only that, but a clean office helps to make a good first impression on customers. Neither your employees nor your customers want to walk into an office that is full of dirt and clutter.
To ensure that you have productive employees and satisfied customers, you’re going to want to make sure your office is clean and decluttered at all times. Here are five ways to ensure that this happens.
Clean daily
If you’re not regularly cleaning your office space, dirt and debris can quickly accumulate. Professional businesses receive a lot of foot traffic from both employees and customers. You’ll want to regularly vacuum or mop your floors, dust and disinfect surfaces, empty trash cans, and make sure there isn’t any debris or paper laying on the floor. Make a list of chores that need to happen daily, weekly, and monthly to ensure that your office is clean. Depending on the size of your business, you may need to consider using a professional commercial office cleaning service to ensure that your office is as clean as possible. A professional cleaning service completely cleans your office for you, allowing you and your employees to focus on the business and your customers.
Assess everything in your office
If your office has reached the point where you no longer have enough storage space for everything to be put away neatly, you’re going to need to assess everything in your office to see what needs to be kept and what can be trashed. Start by organizing common office supplies, such as pens and sticky notes. Most offices accumulate a large number of common supplies without even realizing how many duplicates they have. Keep only what you absolutely need and donate the rest. After that, go through old paper files. Trash or shred files that you no longer need (don’t forget to go through your collection of business cards). If you need to keep some old files, such as budget records, consider storing them in a space that isn’t in your immediate office. Finally, once you’ve gotten rid of unnecessary supplies and files, look at your furniture. If you have unused desks and chairs, consider putting them in storage or donating them.
Find a home for everything
So that items don’t end up cluttering up your space, make sure that everything has a home within a desk drawer, cabinet, closet, or on a shelf. This will help prevent items such as staplers from cluttering up desks and tables. If you’re struggling to find a place for everything, that is a sign that you either need to purge some items or invest in a larger storage system. After everything has a home, make an inventory list that tells where everything is supposed to be. An inventory list helps prevent you from buying duplicates of existing items and also helps you easily locate items. If employees have a habit of taking items from where they belong and not putting them away, an inventory list can also help determine where an item is meant to belong.
Digitize paperwork
Technology is great! Network drives, G Suite, and OneDrive make it easy to take all those paper files and turn them into e-documents. Scan paper documents and upload them to a secure location so that you can trash or shred the physical copies. E-documents take up no physical space within your office. This means you can get rid of bulky filing cabinets. You can also easily share e-documents as a team, which can increase your overall productivity. Just remember that you’ll want to ensure that your cloud storage is secure so that your important documents don’t end up in the wrong hands.
Get rid of excessive knickknacks
If knickknacks have somehow managed to survive the decluttering process, encourage your employees to select their favorites and ditch the rest. It is great for employees to personalize their space with a few special items, but their office desk is not the place for their collection of ceramic cats.
Final thoughts
Regularly cleaning and decluttering your office will create a more organized, productive, and professional work environment. Plus, a clean environment improves air quality and helps keep your employees healthy. Customers will immediately gain a good first impression of your business when they walk into a clean environment and are greeted with good customer service.
