Having a clean and tidy workspace is one of the best ways to improve your staff productivity – after all, clean offices mean tidy minds! Not only can having a well-organised working environment make your office look better, it’s also good for mental health too, so it’s something that’s well worth focusing on.
Unfortunately, it can be easier said than done to keep your workspace uncluttered and tidy. If offices and desks are already filled with junk, it can be all-too-tempting to simply add to the existing pile of stuff. With this in mind, here are some of the key factors that lead to extra mess building up in your office.
Meetings
Perhaps the biggest factor in mess generation in any office environment has to be meetings. Whenever an appointment is due, the inevitable setup for a meeting means the office is spotless. Unfortunately, then catering arrives. Several sandwiches, pastries and cups of coffee later and the office looks like a bomb’s hit it. Even worse, nobody has any energy left to clean it up! That increases the chances of all the cups and plates sitting in the room for days or, even worse, it all gets moved into the kitchen where it sits in the sink until someone finally gets around to washing up.
Sickness
When a bug is going around the office, office cleanliness can take a massive hit. Not only will there be a mounting mass of tissues in the bin, there’ll also be bacteria and viruses lurking around the surfaces of the workspace. Cold and flu viruses linger on desks, computer keyboards and surfaces for as long as 24 hours. That means they can spread easily around your office, especially if workers share computers, telephones or pens.
Paper
Unless you’re running a paper-free office, you’ll find that over time, paper begins to mount up. Sticky notes, reports, scribbled messages and documents which need shredding or filing can pile up on desks. These must be dealt with regularly to keep the volume down, however it’s something which often gets overlooked. Spending just a few minutes every day sorting papers into ones to recycle and ones to keep can prevent this from becoming an issue.
Food
A third of workers in the UK don’t leave the workplace for lunch, and many more work through their entire lunch break. That means inevitably they will be eating at their desks and the result is crumbs and spills all over surfaces, keyboards, phones and the computer mouse. The mess left by food doesn’t just look bad, it smells bad and could cause health hazards. If workers are eating at their desk, they should lay paper over the surfaces which can then be cleared easily as well as throw away any food that won’t be eaten. If there’s an office fridge, it’s important to clean it out regularly to prevent food from going bad.
Poor Cleaning Standards
If your office always looks dirty and messy, it’s time to call in a professional commercial cleaning service like North Kent Cleaning. Our skilled team can handle all the messes that you don’t have time to address to keep your workplace hygienic and productive.
