BLOG

A messy office leaves your business disorganized and with a poor public image. It is important to keep clean for you and your employees.

1. Throw Away Trash – Keeping your office space open and free can be as simple as throwing away unnecessary clutter. If you have trouble getting rid of certain items try to separate every single item in your office into these four categories: keep in office, hideaway, potential trash, and throw away. Once you have narrowed it down, you are left with the items you must absolutely throw away and the items you may potentially throw away. For the items you still possibly want to keep, place a number on each item based on its importance and throw away the items that have a low number.
2. Separate Your Office Into Zones – When you begin to separate your office space into work zones you will completely understand your goals. For example, having a zone specifically for computer usage, library research, and a spot for specific tasks such as (brainstorming, employee meet space, etc) will better organize your work day.
3. Sticky Notes – This seems like an overused cliché tactic, but in reality, it works! Your office can get pretty dirty and at times it is hard to keep yourself updated on a specific task. Having a wall where you can place sticky notes for you to remember what you need to do is extremely helpful. Dedicating most of the notes to having a cleaning segment to give you a quick reminder to clean the desk or remove dust on the computer screen will ensure your office space is at it’s prime for your optimal work experience.
4. Food – It is easy to get caught up in the chaos of the day and decide to eat lunch at your desk; let’s not forget the countless snacks. A great rule of thumb is: if you aren’t at your desk, it should look that way. The smell and dirtiness it leaves not only builds a messy workspace, but probably grosses out your office mates. Make sure to throw away anything you haven’t touched or thought about in the last 5 minutes. Plates, bowls and silverware are just building layers of bacteria. Staying on top of your food mess will also help you limit your snacking by tracking the amount of trash!
5. Disinfect – After you have cleaned the food and paper clutter and random accessories you have collected throughout the year, it is important to take the next step. Disinfect. Keep disinfectant wipes close by for a quick and easy way to clean off your desk, computer, keyboard, phone and chair arms.
6. Conquer the Internal Mess – Start with your computer desktop and move everything into properly labeled folders. After you can sense some direction in your organizing it is time to go deeper. That’s right, open up that e-mail inbox and begin to sort things into folders. You can either sort by subject or possibly folders of importance. Remember that all the unimportant items are deleted they go into a trash bin that needs to be cleaned out, also.
7. Make Time – It is no doubt that if you make the time to clean all of these components of your work life that your days will run smoothly. Schedule the time in your work calendar so that everyone in the office knows not to cause interruptions. Creating a to-do-list is key when the piles of mess are overwhelming. Most importantly, have a positive attitude!
8. Maintain – Once the initial cleaning is done, the future tidy will not take you nearly as long. Here are some simple steps to maintaining that pristine workspace you just made for yourself:

• On a day to day basis, make sure to leave your desk de-cluttered. Allow yourself 5 minutes before leaving for the day to make sure everything is put in a designated place.
• At the end of every week make sure to check supplies and wipe down your desk. Everyone knows there is nothing worse than coming in on Monday to a messy desk.
• Every month go through the random paperwork that slipped through the cracks and find them a forever home in your filing cabinet.

Remember that all this hard work pays off in the end! You will now have extra time to make that extra cup of coffee around the afternoon lull, or possibly take a quick 10 minute walk outside during your break! At Service Uniform, maintaining a clean workplace for your services is important to us.