Keeping your office tidy for you and your employees can have a significant impact on productivity. Whether you’re the manager of a small office space or the head of a larger department, certain principles of cleanliness and tidiness could have a huge effect not only on efficiency but on employee morale as well.
Here’s a short guide to things that every office manager should do to keep their office clean and why those things are important. It’s not terribly difficult to keep a small office space clean if you know these simple tips. In short: the cleaner your office is, the happier your employees will be.
Get equipped
Before we get into why keeping your office clean is so important, you should realize that it’s not that hard to do. You may think differently, but that’s probably because you’ve put off cleaning for so long that the office has accumulated filth and clutter that might take a while to get through, at least the first time.
After you do it once though, keeping up with regular cleaning shouldn’t be that time-consuming. Just a few minutes a day will keep all the clutter at bay and help things look tidy and productive.
So if you haven’t already, get basic cleaning supplies to put in the office to make the daily task of keeping it clean that much easier. Get anti-bacterial wipes and tissues for the desks. Invest in a good paper shredder hire a shredding company so that you have no excuse to accumulate piles of outdated memos and old hardcopies of schedules and CDs.
Just remember that not all services can deal with digital media like hard-disks, CDs, and other physical media. Neither you or your employees will have any excuse to let things pile up on the desks, in the file cabinets, and in desk drawers.
Now that that’s out of the way, here are the best reasons why you need to keep your office clean.
Keep everyone healthy
Just like a dirty home, a dirty office is a nest of bacteria and germs. The health of your employees is a really tangible benefit of keeping your office clean. If you can make it less likely that your employees get sick, you can improve productivity right there by making it less likely that they’ll have to take a day off.
Use those sanitary wipes you bought to disinfect common contact surfaces. These include the surfaces of desks and cabinets, keyboards, computer mice, and monitors. You don’t need to shell out for expensive and smelly cleaning products when there are perfectly effective wet wipes available that do just as well and are much easier to use.
Help your employees with stress
Everything about clutter makes the office space more stressful to work in. The first reason is the obvious effects on productivity where your employees don’t know where their stuff is because their desk is cluttered. This makes them stressed out naturally because they aren’t being as efficient at their job and their work and storage spaces are frustrating to root through.
However, this physical impediment to working isn’t the only reason to keep the office clean and free of clutter. Messes have a tangible mental effect on workers and reduce productivity simply by stressing people out. In fact, Science Direct measured cognitive effects using baselines for work outcomes and collaboration based on reactions to the work environment and found a direct relationship between the quality of that environment and workers’ productivity.
You don’t have to do that much to stop clutter from accumulating in the office. Invest in a mid-range vacuum cleaner to get the carpet looking nice and free of dirt – that can have a huge effect on morale. Tell employees to reduce the amount of time they’re eating at their desks and to use only communal meal spaces.
This produces a cascading effect of stress relief. Not only are employees less distracted at their desks, but there’s less mess in the common workspace and more stress-relieving interaction in the breakroom.
Even if you don’t want to do it yourself, you can have each employee vacuum and tidy up their own workspace. However, you have to do it, getting rid of everything from scrap paper to crumbs in the carpet to dirty cups can have an immediate calming effect on employees’ stress levels.
The Takeaway
Clutter has been known to cause harmful effects to our attention spans, our ability to cope with difficult work assignments, and our stress levels. This means that the extra paper in your employees’ desks and the crumbs on the floor could be hampering their productivity by having a negative effect on their anxiety that they may not even be aware of.
Additionally, a lack of cleanliness can also lead to more low-level sicknesses in the office, which in turn leads to more stress and less productivity.
These are the reasons why a tidy office is a happy office. The good news is that keeping an office clean after the initial overhaul shouldn’t be that difficult. It will just require a little equipment and a lot of short-term diligence. Wiping things down, shredding old clutter, and keeping everyone clean will keep them calm as well.
The sooner you realize this, the sooner your office space will reach its full potential.
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