A while ago we talked about the fact that clean desks make a happier office. How they boost productivity, encourage teamwork and improve morale. Now imagine all those benefits, but spread out across the entire office. If clean desks can make your office worker happy, then providing them with a wider office space that is clean and organised can have numerous benefits, both for your employees and your business. De-cluttering and organising your office can make it easier for you to find things, provide clean audit trails for paperwork and remove the risk of data theft. This month, we bring you a quick guide to managing your office clear out, with some tips to keep your office organised going forward.
Block Out Some Time & Set Up
Clearing out a cluttered, disorganised office takes time. It’s not the sort of thing you can do in pieces across the week, because everything will just start getting cluttered again as you go on. So, if you are committed to organising your office, block out some time to get it done. If you work in an office with other people, a weekend or evening is ideal, as there won’t be a lot of people around to disturb you. Now get yourself set up. The ideal way to organise is to completely empty your office space, as it’s much easier to control the flow of what goes back in where when the room is empty. However, for many people that’s just not practical, so instead choose which area you will focus on first and how you will move around the room. Get yourself some heavy-duty bin bags and dive in.
Sort
It’s amazing the sorts of odd things you find in an office when you really look. Balls of string (when you can’t fathom why you’d need one), forgotten boxes of stationary, piles of paperwork that’s long out of date, even old food containers and piles of receipts. As you’re going through, sort everything into piles. We find ‘keep’ and ‘bin’ to be quite effective, but you might want to be more specific and have a pile for stationary, one for paperwork to keep and one for paperwork to shred, for example. Once you’ve worked through the section and put everything in piles, you can clean the area and start to put things back in a logical order, or place them in another section of the office if that’s where they belong. Repeat this process around your entire office, and you will end up with a cleaner, tidier office and a large pile of things to dispose of. If it’s normal office rubbish, you can throw this away and forget about it. For the paperwork, make sure it is all in a sack and call your local secure shredding facility to help you dispose of it safely.
Install A Shredding Bin
Believe it or not, this one small change will have a big impact on how tidy and secure your office remains once you’ve cleared it out. All you need is a simple bin lined with one of our shredding sacks, and a sign. This enables you to have a dedicated place for employees to dispose of confidential paperwork, separate from the oh so inviting lure of the recycling bin. You can arrange to have your sack collected and emptied as often as you need to, and Hungry Shredder will take away the full sack to be shredded in one of our secure shredding faculties. The resulting scraps are then sent for recycling, so you are not only holding up your data security obligations, but your environmental ones too.
Buy Some Supplies
The biggest mistake a lot of people make is going out and buying a load of new organisational supplies, and then finding that the solutions don’t work when they’ve actually tidied up their workspace. Buying supplies before you’ve established what you have to keep and where it needs to live is just asking for more clutter and confusion. So, it’s the last thing you should do. Once you’ve de-cluttered and cleaned, lay out everything you know you need to keep in piles. Put away anything that already has a home or a system, and then decide what you need based on what you have left. If you have a lot of documentation, maybe look into buying a filing cabinet or investing in a digital document management solution. If you find yourself with a lot of letters – and in-tray. By buying only the supplies you know you need, you save yourself space, money and a lot of aggravation.
It might sound simple, but organising your office can make a huge difference not only to the performance of your employees, but to the way your office operates as well. Slick, organised offices tend to have less trouble with paperwork and audits, less friction between employees and a healthier atmosphere for everyone who visits. At Hungry Shredder, we specialise in helping you manage your paper waste, keeping your office secure and free of rubbish. For more information, get in touch with our team today for your free consultation.