Let's Get Organised: How To Keep Office Workspaces Neat & Tidy
.jpg)
Everyone in the office has a dedicated workspace. It becomes their home; the place they spend most of their hours at work. As days pass and months rack up, the humble office workstation quickly becomes overcrowded with junk. Well, it’s not just junk - some of the stuff on the desk is important, but it gets lost in and amongst the junk!
You end up with an office full of disorganised desks that look terrible and lead to a lack of productivity. Some of you may have specifically designed your office for productivity, so allowing the desks to get out of hand undoes all your hard work. That’s where our focus for this blog post lies; how do you keep office workspaces neat and tidy? It’s time to get organised, but before we do, here is a quick note on why this is integral for your business.
The Importance of Organised Workstations
Tidy place, tidy mind…right?
This might sound like a quote you see on the side of a gimmicky mug, but there are genuine mental health benefits to staying organised. Studies show that an organised environment can give you a positive mood boost and aid productivity. If you can keep all of your employees’ desks free from as much clutter as possible, it’ll make your workplace a much better place for everyone’s mental well-being.
Moreover, a study from Brother found a few eye-opening statistics about messy desks and people’s moods/attitudes. 31% of those surveyed reported an increase in stress when desks are messy, 21% said it adds to their workload and 20% admitted that a messy desk directly affects their performance at work.
There’s already enough here to convince you of the benefits of organising everyone’s workstations. It makes sense from a performance standpoint, but don’t forget about the optics either. If people visit your workplace - important people, like clients or prospects - they’ll be appalled if every desk they see is messy and full of junk. You want people to see a clean and organised office environment as it reflects positively on your brand.
In a weird way, organised offices and desks build trust with clients and leads. Put yourself in their shoes and imagine you’re walking into an office for the first time. Either you’re planning on working with the business or you’re already their client and you see everything is a mess. Desks are loaded with clutter and it looks like pure chaos. Do you feel like you trust this company or are you having second thoughts?!
Neatness creates trust as it makes it appear that your business knows what it’s doing and is in control. Anyone who enters your office for a meeting will leave feeling confident that they’ve trusted the right company.
How to Keep Your Office Workspaces Neat & Tidy
You’re likely chomping at the bit to get started after reading the importance of tidy workstations and want to ensure the following is achieved:
- Every desk in your office looks nicely organised, and;
- All the desks remain organised over time
It sounds virtually impossible as you’re kind of relying on employees to stay organised. This is somewhat true, though the tips we’re about to divulge will make it easier for everyone to keep their stations tidy.
Go Paperless
Start things off with an overhaul of how you run your office and deal with documents. Paper is the number one cause of messy desks; whether it’s important documents stacked on top of one another or scrap paper lying around, it all ends up on desks and makes them look ridiculously cluttered.
The quick and easy solution to this is to go paperless.
Stop using paper in your office as much as possible - you could get to the point where no physical paper is needed at all. File documents digitally, sign things digitally and so on. This can have many proposed benefits aside from making desks look a lot neater. A paperless office saves money by not using paper or printer ink. It’s also far more organised and productive as locating documents is as simple as searching for them on a computer.
From our perspective, this is one of those tips with zero downsides. What do you need paper for anymore? Clients prefer getting sent digital copies of contracts and documents anyway as it means they don’t have to wait as long. If they want the paper versions, they can print them! It’s a win-win scenario that declutters desks and moves your business into the digital age.
Install Under-Desk Storage
Most businesses can go 100% paperless but we appreciate that it’s not immediately feasible for everyone. You still have paper documents floating around the office, so this tip helps you move them off your desk and into a more organised system.
All you need is some under-desk storage in the form of drawers or filing cabinets. Most desks can be bought with this storage anyway or you can find some that attach to them. Worst-case scenario; find a little filing cabinet or set of draws that fits under your office desks without taking up too much legroom. This gives you somewhere to keep and file away any paper documents.
What if you are 100% paperless? That’s great - this storage will still be useful to remove other clutter from the desk area. A simple drawer helps store things like pens, pencils, sticky notes, calculators or any other thing that might be on your desk but doesn’t need to be out all of the time. The excellent thing about under-desk storage is that it encourages employees to keep their desks tidy. They can easily bung everything in a drawer or cabinet so the desk area looks sparse and neat!
Provide Employee Lockers
Sometimes, workstations look messy because employees dump a lot of personal items on them. Maybe they keep their lunchbox on the desk or perhaps they place a bag on it. To be honest, even something like a coat hung over a chair looks pretty unprofessional and messy!
Solve this problem with an office locker for every employee. Install a set of lockers on the side of a wall and everyone has a safe place to keep their items. They can hang coats, place bags and keep food in the lockers while they work. It’s another great storage solution to remove clutter from the workstation and into a more organised space.
Minimise Wires
Our final tip is to look at the wires in and around an office desk. You will have many coming from your computer and leading to monitors, a keyboard, a mouse, etc. Some of these wires can’t be removed - but you can use cable management products to neaten them up. Cable ties bring multiple wires together while cable boxes can be fitted under the desk to collect most of the wires and leave the area looking a lot neater.
Even simpler than this; use wireless mice and keyboards. It completely negates the presence of messy wires on a desk and immediately makes the workstation look a lot neater. Especially when combined with the other tips mentioned above - you end up with a very sparse desk area!
An Organised Desk Leads to a Better Workplace
As we’ve discussed in this post, an organised desk will have benefits for the entire workplace. Your business should focus on encouraging every employee to keep their stations tidy - and this is only possible by implementing the t
.jpg)
.jpg)
